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To: SI Bob who wrote (10994)	1/22/2000 1:40:00 AM
From: SI Bob	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 32883

Just learned something the hard way that I thought I'd share lest anyone else try this at home. First, let me summarize what's happened up to now: Through an act of idiocy on my part, I zapped a hard drive, but thanks to the help of folks here, I was able to find a donor drive with which to fix it so I can get my data off of it. In the meantime, I set up a new drive, installed Windoze98 on it, Office, browsers, email, dialup connections and everything else from scratch so I'd be functional again. A lot of time went into this setup. On to the present: I put the repaired drive in my wife's machine and got the networking happening again and decided to put a copy of the old drive's contents onto the new drive, then back the old drive up to tape. I made a directory on my new drive called OLD_C, then tried to XCOPY the old drive onto it. No good. It blows off as soon as it runs into the first error (which is when it tries to copy the swap file in the root directory). Fine. No problem. I've gotten past this kinda stuff before. I then decide to use Windoze to do the deed. I go to the old drive, Select All, and copy it to the OLD_C directory on the new drive. It's humming along real nicely until it runs into a file that gives a read error. Blows off. Fine. I'm not out of tricks yet. I fire up MSBackup and have it do a backup of the old drive onto the OLD_C directory. After about 2.1 gig, I notice I'm not hearing the happy chattering of hard drives any more. I check my wife's machine (it's doing the grunt work of the backup) and it's telling me the tape is full and to insert another one. I check the new drive. Nope. Still have about 29 gig available. I notice though that the backup file is no longer zero bytes, so I move it to another directory, then tell my wife's machine to continue the backup. It says the tape contains data and asks if I want to erase it. I tell it no, but it persists in asking me even after I cleaned out the OLD_C directory. Finally I tell it Yes. Big mistake! I hear happy chattering, but only one drive is doing it. I go back to my machine and do a DIR. 29.5 gig available. I do it again. 30 gig available. 30.5 next. I'm sure you're way ahead of me now. I watch in horror as files then directories start disappearing. I'm writing this message from a machine that has an empty hard drive and when I send it, I have to reinstall everything again. All that exists on this machine is what is in memory right now. Fortunately, the old drive still has everything. The new drive is a clean slate, though. This is going to be a long weekend. Anyway, the lesson is this: Never use MSFT's backup program to back drives up onto each other. Gotta go. I'll go through the %&$(#)@! re-install sometime tomorrow. Regards, SI Admin (Bob)