Crash

[RC Storick]

Well guys it seems I will be running at a disadvantage for a while. My good graphics computer took a dump. I loaded the Dazzle software and it shot craps. I was loading the Billy I-beam video promo. So until I get the thing fixed I am running at half throttle. What this means is it will be a couple of weeks till I get the videos up loaded and the on-line mag started.

I should be able to rebuild it in the next few weeks. The bad thing was is I lost all info on that Hard drive so now I have to re-load all programs and download the back-ups from the server. Computers  EERRRRRRRRRR!!!! 

[Bob Reeves]

Robert, have you tried taking the hard drive out and putting it in another computer as a secondary drive to see if you can at least access the files? Before you reformat the darn thing it is worth a try.

[RC Storick]

I tried that already. It seems the HD took a dump and took the mother board with it. I went to Comp USA and I have PC166 and they have something new now so I need to but a new chip,motherboard,2 GIG of ram and a new Hard drive. Could be real pricey! I need the best for Video editing.

I sure am glad I have my CAD program disks along with all the other stuff. It will just take time. I lost a ton of photos too. Some are on my laptop and a few are on the downstairs PC LUCKY!!!

Just one more of the costs of maintaining this site for all to enjoy. One more hill to climb...

[RC Storick]

Some how i got this hunk of junk to work. But its time for a new one

[Lee Thiel]

If you got it working, you got lucky.  I wasn't.  Get your pics on disks quick, before you lose them.  I lost years of family, motorcycle and plane pictures when mine crashed about a month ago. Good luck!
Lee TGD

[RC Storick]

Well its acting goofy! so I backed up all the photo's to my downstairs computer. In case this one is lost and I think its a goner.

[Bob Reeves]

OK everybody... Right now before you do anything else go buy Norton Ghost, the personal edition is not expensive.. Think you can probably get it at Wal-Mart, I know Best Buy, CompUSA, Office Depot and Staples all carry it. You probably already have a CD or DVD burner in your computer, if not get one and a stack of blank CD's or DVD's.

Ghost can create an image of your hard drive and directly burn it to CD's or DVD's. A CD will hold about 1/2 a Gig and a DVD will hold about 6 Gig, it will probably take at least 10 CD's or two DVD's to back up the typical hard drive...

DO IT NOW before you end up like too many of my customers and wish you had.

[RC Storick]

Bob All my important stuff is backed up now. Still will need to repair old faithful.

[Bob Reeves]

Bob All my important stuff is backed up now. Still will need to repair old faithful.

Great, if I can be of any help let me know...

[Roger Vizioli]

Robert and Bob,
You guys are helping each other, working together, as if you are on a carrier or flight line.
Cant break old habits, huh? 
That's another reason this site so great! There is a wealth of "non-modeling" talent here
Roger

[Randy Powell]

Yea, I have an old computer (1 gig Pent 2) with linux installed that is on my network basically as a back up computer. I've set up cron to back up the critical files on my main linux machine, my wife's entire laptop with Win XP pro and my son's entire drive also running XP to the old box. It has a large SCSI raid with about 400 gigs of space just for this purpose. Doesn't have a monitor, but I can log onto it remotely for maintenence. Backs up automagically twice a week. Haven't worried about crashes to my son's and wife's boxes since. I haven't had a crash on one of my boxes since installing linux 10 years ago other than one HD failure and even with that one, it only partially died and I was able to transfer the latest files before it puked. But my son's and wife's computers have gone blue screen of death about twice a year since set up. Nice to have an easy remedy.

[Bob Reeves]

Ya I will be the first to say that when running Windows you need a backup plan to easily get back when it barfs. When I was running Windows 95/98 I regularly copied the Windows directory to a backup directory using Xcopy32. On a bunch of occasions just having that simple backup saved me many hours of putting things back together. The Xcopy trick won't work with 2000/XP so I use Ghost.

[Tom Perry]

You scared me at first Robert.  I thought it was worse.  I was wondering which of your models crashed and it turns out it was just a computer.   

[Larry Cunningham]

Robert,

Must be something in the air.. My #2 80GB hard disk started acting up 2 days ago..
Naturally I had moved my mailboxes to that drive, so I lost them (for awhile, the drive
started working again..). All sorts of events warning of "imminent disk failure", followed
by the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) with some king of kernel paging fault..

Time for new drives, with the subsequent headache of rebuilding a system. I have a
recommended link for anyone getting ready to rebuild a system and wanting to shut
down all the garbage "features" that you get by default:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041129093039/www.blackviper.com/Articles/OS/OSguides.htm

The "Black Viper" guy has all the poop on what services you can safely set to manual or disable
to sleek up your operating system. He also has installation guides for various Windows versions
with step by step info.

Check it out!

Oh yeah, one comment about using Ghost. In concept, it is a great program, however you have
to be "restoring" a disk image to exactly the same sized disk the image was taken from. That is,
for example, in my case, I'm replacing 80 GB disks with 250 GB disks, so I cannot just Ghost a
restoration of my old disk..

Also, when you use Ghost with multiple disks (e.g. saving to DVD disks), you have to have the last
disk to recovery ANY data. So, for example, in my case, after writing 4 out of 5 DVD disks with a
Ghost image, the computer dumps again, I have no way to access ANY of that saved image, because
the last Ghost backup disk wasn't successfully written.

At least with data backups, this is not the case.

Also, in spite of Ghost doing a great job of restoring a disk image, don't expect this to be an
absolutely fool proof way to transfer stuff to a new computer. The new system has just enough
different in terms of configurations and drivers, etc. that it is best to re-install almost all software
(which can be a pain).

Whatever methods you use, bringing up a "new" computer (with new disks on it, that is) is
a royal pain.

Good luck to anyone trying to accomplish it (including ME!).

L.

"The wise see knowledge and action as one; they see truly." -Bhagava Gita

[Randy Powell]

Larry,

One of the reason I went for a lot of storage (besides it's pretty cheap now) was to avoid back up programs, disk images or any sort of such stuff. The files are copied with directory tree as whole files to the backup system. Then I have a program that runs weekly to archive old files. I can review the archives every so often and delete the oldest stuff. Nice thing is, if something pukes, I just go the the backup and copy what I need without the use of a trick program or anything; just a file manager.

In the case of linux, if I were to have a complete hard disk failure, I just replace the disk, reinstall linux, copy the original install log and use prn and cron to look at that and restore whatever I need to bring the system back to what it was before the crash. prn will even download any files I'm missing (for whatever reason). Would probably take an hour or two, but less that tracking stuff down again and starting over.

In the case of XP, I just install the new disk, have Windows bless it as a boot drive and copy the backup onto the new disk. Could lose as much as two days of files (except for my sons music and .au files that are backed up during sessions), but that would be it. Pretty easy overall and transparent.

[Larry Cunningham]

Randy,

What you describe is similar to what I use. Having two disks, at least one of them is OK, and after the
OS (Win2kPE in my case) is installed and disk partitioned, I install the disk(s) and copy from them. Data
tends to not get lost, but I usually take this opportunity to clean up the entire configuration, etc.

I like to use the second drive exclusively for backup images, although as time goes on, and the disks
start to get full, I tend to find myself using it for data, which is where I can run into data loss. At about
$100 for a 250 GB internal hard disk nowadays, it is a cheap, fast backup device.

That's the problem - we have so MUCH of our life information kept on our computers nowadays..

In my case, my home computer is also pretty much my livelihood, so I can REALLY be screwed when
it is down. You'd think I'd be more diligent about keeping things backed up.

L.

"Live your life so that whenever you lose, you are ahead." -Will Rogers

[airbrush]

Hey all,
   One other thing you can try if you're having hdd troubles.
I know it sounds crazy, but sometimes you can take the
drive out of the computer and put it in the freezer. Let it get
cold, almost frozen.
Usually you can get the disk to work long enough to retrieve
most of your data.
good luck
james
aka airbrush

[Bob Reeves]

Wasn't aware Ghost wouldn't copy an image to a larger disk, never tried it. We purchased the enterprise edition of Power Quest's "Drive Image" several years ago and it will allow you to restore an image on just about anything. I have even restored to smaller drives than the original. Sad part is Symantec (Norton) bought out Power Quest a while back so not sure what the capabilities of the current version of Ghost are. Could be Symantec has incorporated Drive Image into Ghost and added more flexibility. Like I said I haven't played with the latest version of Ghost so can't say one way or the other.

In any case, did a little research and found this...

http://www.drive-backup.com/home/personal/

I understand it will at least allow you to go from a smaller drive to a larger one and the price isn't bad for the personal edition.

[Larry Cunningham]

I could be wrong about using Ghost to restore a smaller disk image
to a larger disk.

It seems to me that I had tried to do the smaller image to larger disk
copy a few years ago (early, more primitive version of Ghost) and it
wouldn't work. But it may be completely possible now.

Since it IS an image copy, sector by sector, I suspect it still might be
a problem, but maybe not.

L.

"Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on." -Samuel Butler

[Richard Grogan]

You can use partition magic to make it(larger drive) the same size. Then after the image is restored, you can resize the new image's partition.

[Bob Reeves]

Power Quest incorporated it's "Partition Magic" into "Drive Image", you can resize either the source (image) or destination partitions, use all of the drive or just what is needed to hold the data from the image. It rewrites the MBR (Master Boot Record) with the new partition and sector info.. Pretty slick actually, just hope Symantec didn't screw it up like they did the Norton stuff..

Just remembered something, I read a tidbit in one of the PC rags that said the latest version of Ghost has to have the Microsoft NET framework loaded in order to work. The another didn't care for that idea and I don't blame him.. Microsoft NET framework adds 40 meg of crap that is not needed nor wanted by 90% of us so instead of having a nice little 1 or 2 meg utitility it's 45 meg. The version of Drive Image I have will fit on one floppy.. Now that's progress Microsoft style...

[Curmudgeon]

The last time I lost my computer I got so pissed  I bought a Dell server instead. Robust power supply, proper cooling, engineered for heavy duty use, mirrored disks etc.  I also picked up a spare hard drive just in case one of the mirrored drives pukes, pull it , swap and let it do it's thing...  I was so pleased with how that worked out,  when my wifes pc started acting up I turned around and bought another. We both depend heavily on our home pc's to be messing around.