P3

[Flyby PC 23]

Wow! Am I a lucky bunny or what?

 

My CCTV at work records the video on an 800Gb IDE hard drive, but started reporting an error with the hard drive.

 

I thought, I know, I'll whap it into the PC and do a scandisk, and a re-format.

 

Problem 1, my CCTV hard drive was IDE, my PC only had eyes for Sata. Luckily, both were Seagate drives, and the printed circuit boards attached to the connection port looked similar, with screwing the same place. I thought, what can possibly go wrong? I switched over the circuit boards, so my IDE hard drive was now a SATA drive. Well, that didn't work, (or perhaps it did) but the damaged hard drive reported an error, no disk found. I thought oh well, it's kaput.

 

Problem 2, I swapped SATA circuit board back onto mt 500GB SATA hard drive, and nothing happened. Dead. The monitor wouldn't even turn on.

 

My main PC shot down by friendy fire. Disaster! No OFF!!!!

 

I thought switching over the circuit boards must have done something critical to the hard drive to kill it stone dead. I managed to get the CCTV back working on an old IDE hard drive, not 800GB, but 250. I get 2 days recording instead of a week but it works. But my PC was very sick. I'd no screen to even try stuff.

 

I started to transfer all my stuff to my smaller work PC. (I had a hard drive backup), but my backup was XP, and my work PC Win7. I tried to get OFF working by just compying it across, but it wouldn't work. Re-install it from scratch.

 

OK, first I can't find the disks, neither BHaH nor HitR. I tear the place apart, and find BHaH. Woohoo!

 

Disaster - see the pic! It's gone bad! Arggghhh!!

 

I cannot find HitR to save my life, but the bad fairies were feeling kind today and I found a spare BhaH! A second copy sent to me in the great release! Woohoo! I have P2!!!!, but no P3...

 

Closeto despair, I took the old hard drive out, and took the circuit board off and on a number of times, but it just wouldn't work. You fool! I thought. How could you be so stupid? (It's easy, I needed the CCTV to work). Suddenly I checked the other end on the SATA cable, and thought, am I 100% positive that's where the plug was connected. I felt sure it was, but hellfire, I've tried everything else. I'll try the other port.

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

 

My P3 is alive. I'm laughing like a maniac.

 

And the moral of the story is.... Don't bother backing up stuff, it won't work, and don't rely on copies of disk because you'll only find you have sat on them or lost them. Don't buy land in dodgy places where you need CCTV to keep attacks from the undead under control. - Don't do any of that. Have faith. If P3 dies on you, P4 is on the way.

 

I have one, working P3, so everything is fine, but it was all a bit hairy there for few hours.... Stress in the workplace eh?

[Lewie 7]

Actually this is one place where I made a conscious decision about my hardware upgrade path. My new system has the ability to run both SATA and IDE drives, and I've been able to save a lot of my old 800 Mhz machine's archives directly from the old HDD's and such to DVD data discs.

 

For some volunteer work I did at our local library I've also been gifted a nifty 5 Gig USB thumb drive. It's one of my most used data transfer devices

 

Both of these have been a lot lot less troublesome than saving old files to CD. I try to rotate my old HDD's out before they start to show trouble, and fire them up twice a year to check on their data condition.

[Olham 164]

Congrats on your recue, Flyby!

 

But there is a way to make safety backups. You need:

 

1. a second hard disk or an external drive

2. ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE or another backup program

 

You need to have OFF installed on the boot partion, which is C:

All savegames and other stuff that might get changed by OFF is also on C:

 

Now you only need to backup your whole C:partition with the above prgogram.

You want to back it up on another drive or the external one.

This brings you a lot of safety, cause you can restore your whole Windows, if anything goes badly wrong.

You'd just write back the BackUp.

Same for OFF and your pilots: write it back, and everything's there again.