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

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (900)	5/29/1998 12:36:00 PM
From: Spots	Respond to of 14778

You and Dave have given me much to think about. I've been oriented toward rebuilding the OS if necessary (and I think it still has merit) but I'm going to go back and reexamine the whole idea. The idea of booting from a backup without cracking the case sounds good (doesn't take long to open the case, but I think we all hate it; I certainly do -- seems to take weeks to get it back together). I have to back up about 3 gigs to capture my full operating environment. But at todays prices, that's not a great big deal from an economic point of view. I once looked into mirroring the boot drive with NT mirroring, but as usual NT throws up a bunch of barriers to recovery. There would be other issues with the boot disk and disk configurations if you tried to "manually mirror" the OS partition. I don't know whether they could be overcome or not offhand -- will have to think that through. You CAN'T generally copy NT from place A to place B and boot from B. even if B's on the same drive as A. Or at least I can't. Been there, tried that, failed. Maybe there's something you can tweak I haven't tried, though (I tweaked the obvious things like boot.ini). No, I have no experience with bootable CDs. My bios nominally supports CD booting, but I guess I don't have a bootable one and I have never attempted to make one. You can't boot NT from a read-only medium, though (that is, the nt directory can't be read only) because of the registry hives and a couple of log files. I haven't tried this myself, but a colleague of mine reports it won't work. His plan, incidentally, was to backup the NT directory to CDRom then restore it and reboot after a crash. Trouble is, it won't boot because all files come off the CD as read-only, and NT insists on writing in a few of them. Must run now. Continue this later. Spots PS. I've been eyeing Drive Image ads in mail catalogs <GGG>. Dave is corrupting me.

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (900)	5/29/1998 5:06:00 PM
From: Spots	Respond to of 14778

Merced delayed till mid-2000 www5.zdnet.com

To: Zeuspaul who wrote (900)	5/31/1998 4:56:00 PM
From: Dave Hanson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Power Quest, backups, and partitions Glad to hear that you and Spots have taken the plunge--I very much hope you're pleased with the two PQ products. It'll also be nice to have such sharp hands to swap notes with on making the most of 'em. You asked several questions in this and other posts, some of which I gather you've already figured out the answers to having bought the products, others of which you've already gotten answers to. I'll give brief replies to your questions where I can, and you and others feel free to follow up where more detail would help. Alas, I would have replied earlier, but I'm having my own configuration nightmares at the moment, trying to make the new Maxtor I got Friday happy. :) More on that in a seperate post. -there are several ways to select among different versions of NT. NT boots using its own process, involving an "ntldr" and boot.ini files on the active partition of the first hard drive (that is, unless you're using boot manager or some similar utility, which can redirect a booting PC to a different partition.) Boot.ini can be edited like a regular text file, and can refer one to as many NT partitions as your hard drive can hold. It is entirely possible, and even safe, to have several different NT installations each on a seperate partition. During the NT install routine, one just tells the installer to put the installation on a different partition, and it will even edit any boot.ini file you already have to reflect the changes. -It should indeed be a simple matter to reinstall a drive image from CDR, provided that you can access the CDR ok from Dos. -chaning the ID drive on a SCSI drive won't change the boot sequence _outside of that SCSI controller._ Within that controller, i.e. 2 bootable hard drives on a single controller, may be another matter. More soon, Dave