Recovery from PC Hard Drive Failure-It Works!

I thought I'd post how I recovered quickly from a complete hard drive failure. It went just as it should, so, there's no question or issue here. Just satisfaction that it all worked. :)

After a day or two of being sure that the old drive was really dead (I thought first I could repair the partition table and bought a new drive to load Win7 on to purchase software, to try that...), I then started the process of restoring data from Carbonite to the new drive to be the new primary.

To do that, I needed the Carbonite password (in 1P).

To get that, I needed Dropbox and 1P (well, I could just have typed in the password from 1P on my Mac or iOS devices, but let's do it the right, easier way... :) )

So, I loaded Dropbox from the Dropbox website and then downloaded the Dropbox data using the copy of the 1P Dropbox password I had elsewhere (the one thing I knew I needed to keep outside of 1P). That took a while, and you do need to wait until it's done for 1P to be happy. (I know the doc says that... just mentioning it because I didn't wait and it complained.)

Once that was done, I loaded a trial 1P, and hooked it up to the Dropbox data. I then could get the 1P license in my 1P to make 1P legal (not that it matters, I had 30 days...).

I then logged in to Carbonite and started the restore of all the data. That will run for a while, but that's not a problem.

Glad to see all the disaster recovery processes actually worked! And, the new hard drive is a lot faster. The old one was probably failing for a while!

And I'm glad I have everything in 1P. The software licenses I don't have in there are going there as soon as I get new copies from their respective companies!