Electronics360: "One Engineer’s Journey to Recover His Malfunctioned Computer"

I have exactly the same problem with my laptop i had a bootable ubuntu 14.04 made as a precaution in happier times and used it to boot the system. Continue with ubuntu even several months after the crash.

Fortunately i could backup my hard drive to a portable 2 tb drive. I have not yet attempted to restore winfows 7 which i had made ommediatelu after purchase of the laptop mainly as i can do most of my daily requorements on the usb ubuntu system though its painfull to keepup with the need to reinstall many titbits of ubuntu like mp4 etc.

Kannan

I lost all my data in hard disk failures 3 times between 1980 and 2002, despite regular backups to tape or external HDDs, and despite occasional check restores.

The problem on each occasion was the use of proprietary backup software with compression, and the lack of built-in error correction, so that one missed byte rendered the whole backup useless. The answer was (a) manually to copy directories to a backup drive either daily or weekly, and (b) regularly to duplicate the entire drive on a partition of an external backup drive - with no compression.

Several​ programs used to be available to perform this latter task, but subsequent 'upgrades' needed for newer operating system versions no longer include this option. However, the last version of Paragon I bought still does this and works with Windows 10.

Whatever, don't trust compressed/encrypted/proprietary-formatted backups: they work​ just fine​ - until you actually need them​.