Reboot - Again
 

Well, it finally happened to my new computer. I have been using a laptop as the family computer for over a year after a card in my desktop got fried. The desktop worked long enough for me to spend a few hours reloading software and died.

The laptop was working fine until yesterday. My sons reported a problem. The machine would boot, flash a blue screen for a tenth of a second, and go into the failed boot menu.

I tried last known good and safe modes with the same result. Either I had a bad sector on a critical portion of the drive or a virus.

I run two firewalls and updated antivirus. Unfortunately, I have a son who might be willing to ignore warnings when something on the Internet tries to initiate a download.

I'm not really sure if this was the case or not.

I reinstalled the manufacturer software, which reformatted the drive. I lost pictures, but I have backups on disk marked to June 2004 so I hope my plastic forks pictures made it, along with my son's graduation.

I have already reinstalled antivirus and firewalls, and am working to reinstall applications software. :compute:

I can send you your forks pics, for this year, anyway.

Run a low-level scan over the drive and maybe see if you can get the SMART information. Things dieing that hard often have nasty causes.

Don't forget to beat your son, just in case.

This is the very reason that my kids now have my old computer. They're not allowed to touch mine.

I've been pondering (read thinking one of these days I ought to before I'm very sorry) get a separate disc storage that plugs in to protect my files in a failure. It's not the money, it's the research time to find something suitable. :(

Bruce - if you have a reasonably up-to-date system, backing up to another hard drive (usb external) or DVD burner is very simple.

Depending on how much you want to backup a flash memory drive might not be a bad idea.

Also, if you're considering a USB harddrive, look into one of the larger MP3 player/ harddrive deals. All your backup needs and the music is handy regardless of your PC situation.

Carrying your backup around in something you might drop is not all that wise. LaCie produce excellent external firewire and USB drives from 40GB to 1.6TB

So I'm unwise eh? :eyebrow:

I've found it very handy to have on , well, hand. You can keep your data local to you and install the software to access it anywhere you go and not worry about security.

Not really his situation, but there you go.

Well let me rephrase that slightly then, carrying your only backup is unwise. I carry a pile of stuff on my iPod but it isn't my own backup by a long shot.

Not sure about the security of plugging your backup into foreign networks and opening things leaving behind caches and other oddities though.

Of course I border on paranoia on this stuff so...

I bit the bullet and went down to CompUSA and bought a Western Digital 100 Gb USB drive for around $200. Problem solved.

External?

You seen an internal USB drive TS? ;)

Oop, missed that.

I can only plead fatigue although that might make a few things simpler. Imagine how many you could stack in a case then.

Couple of RAID cards and the limit is the power supply anyway. You could do an internal USB - plenty of headers on most mobos and the board to do the conversion is tiny but well, it's a bit like putting a 50cc scooter exhaust on a Ducati 999S.

I'm only talking quantity not quality.

On a side note I'm about to have to make the move to SATA soon.

To Have to? what's making you? Last I checked it was barely faster than IDE.

Thanks for the input. Methinks it's time to get off my butt. :D :thumpsup:

More drives. My IDE slots are full, but the motherboard has SATA built in.

what is the deal with RAID and how does it work ??? I have scsii card ( scsii scanner and zip drive ) , do i just need to find a few driver and software and put them togather ???

I have quite a few LPs that i want to record and store .

RAID is basically linking together a bunch of hard drives to act as one in a few different ways. You can do RAID over SCSI but I don't know too much about it, I'm only really familiar with IDE/SATA and software RAID over firewire.

You can have each store half the data so it's much faster to read and write.
You can have both store the data so it's twice as reliable.
After that there's a variety of combinations of the above depending on what the emphasis is on.

SCSI is the Small Computer Systems Interface. RAID is a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Ironic then that both of these became the definitive storage tech for large, enterprise-class servers.

RAID started on SCSI, and much later moved to IDE and SATA. SCSI supports 7 drives on one cable, so it was only natural someone would try this. RAID stitches multiple drives together to look like one drive. Done one way, you get more speed and space. Done another way, you get more reliability.

Lots more at Wikipedia.