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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Surfer who wrote (14307)	11/24/2003 8:23:09 AM
From: Louis V. Lambrecht	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Surfer - most probably your drive has S.M.A.R.T. (some BIOSes let you use the feature or not, mostly S.M.A.R.T. is default, but bever change BIOS settings on a working hard drive). Utilities exist, running in the bakground, which would warn you for impending hard disk slow death. Haven't found one yet. Once in a while I run WDC Lifeguard (which is multivendor) support.wdc.com

To: Surfer who wrote (14307)	11/24/2003 1:02:39 PM
From: Jon Tara	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 14778

Repeat this mantra: "hard drives are cheap" "hard drives are cheap" "hard drives are cheap"... I would make a copy of your hard drive onto a new one ASAP. Get a drive copy program - my favorite is Paragon Drive Backup (you won't find in retail stores, but you can buy and download online). There are plenty available in the stores as well - Norton, etc. Hook up the second drive, bring up your system, and make a copy. As a longer-term solution, I highly recommend getting two of the drive trays that will allow you to plug your drives in and out. Once a week, (or at approprite intervals for your own usage) make a copy. After you've made the copy, switch the drives so that you are running from the COPY. (This will insure that you have a good copy - if it is bad, you will know immediately.) Put the original in a safe place. The next week, repeat - i.e. copy and swap again. This gives you several big advantages over backup to other media: 1. You do not need to copy anything back to your hard drive. If you have a failure, you simply unplug the failed drive and plug in the copy, and you are up in minutes. And keep in mind that with Windows, you can't always simply copy files to restore functionality anyway. You really need a complete image of the entire drive. 2. It is great for diagnosing situations just like this. Unsure of whether you have a problem with your hard drive, or is it something else? Pop in the copy, and see if the problem goes away. For maximum safety, it is best to employ THREE drives in a backup cycle. For example, let's say your power supply went wacky, and destroyed your hard drive. Only you don't know that that is what happened. You plug in the backup, and it destroyes the backup. If you use 3 drives, you still have a good copy. Don't ever use the 3'rd copy unless you have absolutely ruled-out any such scenario, or have diagnosed and fixed it. When I was in college, I worked as a student assistant programming in the school's computing center. This was... ahem... quite a while back. We had IBM 360s, with "washing machine" hard drives. These had removable disk packs. There was a failure of a drive, and so the operator removed the disk pack and moved it to a GOOD drive. Darn if that drive didn't fail too. So, the operator moved it to ANOTHER good drive. Memorex spent the next couple of days repairing the half dozen drives that the operator destroyed by moving the pack from drive to drive to drive looking for a good one... One of the platters was warped, and it caused a literal head crash on every drive that he moved it to...