I seldom run dual harddrives, a bad habit I know, but it's one that's hard to break.

This morning my system wouldn't fire up, just as it was about to load windows, it would reboot itself over and over and over again.

Safe mode - Nothing
Boot off CD and floppy - Nothing
Chkdsk - Nothing

*shrug* ˟˟˟˟ happens I guess.

Tracked down a loaner harddrive, loaded XP onto it, set it to my master, booted off of it, YAY!

All my photos are still here, but my harddrive is starting to die on me is the best guess I have at what happened. Never seen anything like it before on any of my systems. The drive is a 2 year old Maxtor 80GB 'quiet drive' dealy incase you're wondering.

Took me an hour to find my network card drivers (still never found them, but found a generic kind that got me up and running for now).

God I hate computers!

If you don't run dual harddrives and you only have one computer at your disposal, do yourself a favor and install a slave drive. You'll be glad you did

 

hmm...try running a some sort of HD test? looking for bad sectors...I'm sure you can salvage it....everytime i had a HD die it wouldnt do jack....could this possible be a savere software prob? maybe even a virus?...try formating then running scandisk once you get everything off of it you can savage....good luck...

 

Scofo thanks for the thread.

My previous PC had it's hard drive ravaged by dust resulting in a tremendous amount of heat build up. The drive smoked it self in a less than dramatic screaching sound. I was truly sad to see my pics and files all lost. Today, my PC has an air filter to remove large dust particles. Plus, I run three drives (1 SATA and 2 IDE) offering over 320 gig of space.

In following month I will setup a mirror disk to copy on the fly.

I currently use microsoft backup. This will change to Norton ghost backup software later this month. The computer's backups are about 50 giga bytes.

Funny, none of it is porn.

 

Anyone here use "BackupmyPC"? And I've heard of Ghost, but does anyone know what the most user friendly, easiest program to use? My life would be one sucky mess if I lost all my data.

Scofco: thanks for bringing up this thread topic.

Bob

 

Hi, Bob:

I think Norton ghost is the easiest because of its automated backup feature.

Ghost hangs in the back ground and backups on the fly creating a mirror image. With ghosts simple setup it's a quick 'snap' to get things going. IMHO it's the closest thing to "keep it simple stupid" theology I use everyday.

I hope this helps.

, Jim

 

Jim,

Ok, then Ghost it is Thanks for the advice

One question: if its "hanging" in the background, does it have any negative effects in terms of slowing down your computer? This ol' war horse I'm using (Dell T600, a 600mhz PIII) is probably not going to like anything that weighs her down

Bob

 

Bob, your PC wouldl make a great linux work station or server if you decided to upgrade. Ghost uses about 20kbytes of memory, and will use 20-50%CPU for a few seconds. It's lean on the memory and but, it can make the CPU utilization jump up during backup computations. Suggest using ghost manually (must click button) rather than sitting in the icon tray in the lower right corner. It will save CPU and memory, but it puts the backup schedule in your hands.

Good luck.

 

theres your problem right there.

 

Yeah, yeah. I actually have grown fond of XP.

I almost tossed Server 2003 on here, but chose XP over it.

I used to run Redhat, but the l33tness factor wasn't enough to keep me using it.

 

*whew*

I hadn't formatted this machine since I built it 2 years ago
Runs like a m'f'er now! I didn't realize how much speed I had lost from all the built up crap. Managed to salvage all my important files, which is the important thing.

So now I'm booting off of and storing my program files on my 40gig IBM and saving my images/videos/etc onto my 80gig Maxtor.

I've been meaning to do this FOREVER, I was just too stingy to purchase another harddrive.

If you don't do this currently, do it.
I thought my system was rock solid, then one morning it wouldn't boot.

 

Another alternative to Ghost is Acronis True Image. It'll back up across a network, create compressed images, allow you to pule single files or directories out of backups, does incrementals... very nice.