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Strategies & Market Trends : A.I.M Users Group Bulletin Board -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: budweeder who wrote (17230)	11/6/2001 11:03:56 PM
From: Steve Grabczyk	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 18928

Hey Bud: Better back it up daily if you can. Otherwise, replace it. Relatively cheap as things go. A few folks at work (the real geeks who know this stuff) run redundant drives (mirrored pairs I think). Odds of losing both at same time are very minute. If you do lose one, then you have the other. Replace the broken one immediately. Server set ups have 'hot swapable' drives. On this PC, I have a tape drive and back up files at least once per week. I bought this in response to losing an HD a few years ago. I lost lots of stuff (inclusing a home grown AIM simulator which I could never duplicate). On my new PC, I'm going to back up files to CD's. I gotta figure out how to schedule that so it selects certain folders to compress and copy. Regards, Steve

To: budweeder who wrote (17230)	11/7/2001 2:46:27 PM
From: OldAIMGuy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18928

Hi Bud, Yes, about a week beforehand the HD had not been willing to let me run "Disk Defragmenter" - a disk clean-up operation. I started up "Scan Disk" to look for errors but it wouldn't complete the run. I ended up running the DOW ScanDisk command which, after hours and hours finally got all the way through the full scan and repair function. It attempts to retrieve information from any bad sector or "cluster" and move it to an unused part of the drive. It then marks the "bad sector" so it can't be used again. Once that tedious job was complete, then I managed to defragment the drive. I then made CD-ROM backups of my entire Program Files section and some other areas. I didn't back up the entire drive which was a mistake. I lost some photos and other things that weren't stored in association with the same programs. Anyway, the computer doctor decided that he'd better check to see if I was pulling his leg about the bad sectors. He fired up windows and started Scandisk. It never finished the job, just like it wouldn't with me. Then when he went to reboot the computer the drive catastrophically crashed. Done! Nada! Belly UP!! So, we couldn't even "ghost" the information from the old drive to the new one. My best suggestion is to start ScanDisk (Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Scan Disk) and run the program over night (this assumes that you don't run this program on a regular basis). Then follow the same path to Disk Defragmenter and run it. Scandisk will, if you check the box, fix any errors it finds and mark the drive sector(s) for the future. Defragging the drive will speed up your file access and make the computer run better. So neither will hurt. If you have even ONE bad sector, then you should probably think about getting a new drive. You can run the new drive as a "mirror" to the old one with some special software. By doing so, it will create a complete copy of your main HD on the back-up. A 20Gig HD was about $85 and the mirror software about another $75, I believe. Not a lot. So, then when the main drive fails, you just switch to the backup drive and toss the old one out. At that time you can purchase another new one and continue the Mirror process. Mine was only about 6 months old. It was a replacement for one that was less than a year old. Very rare, from what I've heard to have one fail so "young" let alone two. My HD in my laptop which has oodles of hours on it still runs just fine and is well over 4 years old. Best regards, Tom