Last Monday I told you SMART Warning Predicts Imminent Hard Disk Failure. A week later, I’m happy to report my laptop is healthy again, most all of my software is installed and all data is safely back where it was earlier.

The biggest delay in the whole process was waiting for the replacement drive. I ordered the new drive on Monday and it didn’t arrive until Saturday. Once in hand, it took less than fifteen minutes to install the replacement drive.

As I suggest in Setting Up a Windows Computer From Scratch, I always partition my drives into three drive letters. So as part of installing Windows on the new drive, I created the three partitions and installed Windows on the C drive. I then immediately installed ZoneAlarm Security Suite so I would be safe when I went online to download updates.

After Windows was installed and updated, I started installing software on the D drive. Some of the software was fairly large so this process took some time. Luckily for me, I just had to click a few buttons and walk away while the installers did their job.

Lastly, I had to restore my data. As I’ve suggested many times, my data is all stored on the E drive and backed up nightly using GoodSync on a NAS drive. All I needed to do was copy the data back from the NAS drive to the E drive and I was all ready to go.

If you plan for these issues in advance, it is pretty easy to survive a failed drive with minimal hassle and zero data loss.