Desktop 4 is my primary desktop system, the one I use every day.
I've had it a couple of years, but it works reasonably well and has the dual monitor adapter installed in it.
Last December its hard drive failed, but I was able to use SpinRite, probably the most incredible disk recovery software I have ever used, to recover all but one sector of the hard drive. I've used SpinRite ever since my PC's had 30 megabyte hard drives (and that was using RLL encoding to take a 20 MB hard drive to 30 MB).
First thing I did was image the drive onto a new drive and start using the new drive.
June 1st, the new drive failed. Looking back I should have seen the symptoms. The system had been running slower the past week or two, most likely a result of disk errors. Too bad they weren't bad enough to alert Windows.
No problem, Microsoft OneCare was configured to do nightly backups.
Actually big problem, turns out OneCare was only backing up "user data," not all the programs I had installed since the new drive was installed.
So out comes SpinRite to try to recover the disk. 166 hours later, SpinRite has found 1,756 unrecoverable sectors. Clearly this is a major drive failure.
Turn to Google to find out what options exist. Along the way I discovered Unstoppable Copier. Unlike Windows, this program claims to recover from disk errors, even trying to recover data.
So I use it to back up what data and programs I can. While doing various sub-copies, I discovered that using a 12" fan to cool the drive improved its reliability. I'm now pretty certain the problem with the drive is heat related. That's not surprising when I popped open the case there was a lot of dust. That's common in Denver, ever since my first PC's, the fans in the power supplies fail within months. The altitude might be a factor too.
Sunday, I decide to bag trying to recover the drive and switch to moving to a new system (on sale when I went down to get a spare hard drive at MicroCenter). Since I can get the old system to boot, just not reliably, I'm going to use PCMover to migrate all my programs off the old system to the new system (which may have the ability to have a mirrored drive, I won't know until I pop open the case).
I'll report on the results in a day or so (based on the estimated time to complete).