Disaster Recovery Complete

I’M FINALLY BACK IN ACTION after a crazy few days. The technical issues that had plagued my PC have all been resolved and I’ve put a new backup solution in place to avoid the same happening to me again (hopefully), but it was a strange series of events that knocked me out of action to begin with.

After the dust settled it seems that the main issue which screwed my system was an onboard Raid controller on my Abit Fatality FP9 SLI motherboard which resulted in a corrupt C: partition which basically buggered my boot disk. Eventually I had to abandon all RAID options at all and install an additional 750MB disk to act as a local backup.

When the RAID was sorted my soundcard decided to bluescreen a lot, which then led to even more chaos and confusion. I replaced the soundcard and everything looked groovy. At that point I’d had to have my system partition rebuilt from scratch but then Saturday arrived and my lovely new 20mb Internet connection was installed.

Having the massive bandwidth to now avail of I set about updating/patching all my stuff on Saturday and just marvelled at the sheer black hole speed that the connection exhibited. Massive amounts of cumulative patching and updates was hoovered up in seconds and downloaded for installation… and that’s where I ran into trouble.

Of course I had my ZoneAlarm firewall and Anti-Virus up and running ASAP and was faithfully clicking on all the approvals as they arrived, but upon one patch / update I noticed a dodgy looking DDE request to the IEXPLORE.EXE program and although my brain twigged it as a problem, my mouse somehow went ahead and clicked ‘Yes’ and hey presto I had a freakin’ virus and had to rebuild the entire system from scratch again.

Fast forward to today; system is completely rebuilt and patched up to date (thanks to that 20mb connection) and I’ve just taken delivery of my (legit) copy of Norton’s Ghost backup/recovery software and started a regime of full/incremental backups which should prevent me getting in to this kind of trouble again.

So – it’s good to be back and expect the normal insanity to commence from tomorrow.