Thank You, Ned Reiter!!

[Jackliz]

We all know how Ned is ALWAYS nagging us to make backup copies of our hard drive.   
Well, I did take his advice in March of this year. I purchased Acronis' TrueImage program and made a backup copy of the hard drive in my Dell laptop and a bootable Recovery disk.  That process used 18 CDs and a bunch of time.

Yesterday I had to use those CDs to fix my broken Dell laptop. The computer would boot up but the Desktop was a black screen. The Desktop would only appear in Safe Mode. Dell tech support tried valiently to help us fix this problem but their solutions failed. The last resort was to use those backup disks or completely reload the OS. Well, the TrueImage Recovery Data Manager worked when Jack and I finally understood its' directions. The recovery process took hours but the computer was recoved back to it's working status of March, 2006. Whew!! 
Then I had to redo the Windows XP service pack 2 and that went well. I reviewed all programs using the Add/Remove Program function and removed a lot of stuff, especially games, videos and graphics. I reinstalled my anti-virus and internet security program(PC-cillin) and my Verizon AccessManager. My computer is working OK and seems to be a little faster. The next thing is to make a back up copy of the hard drive!!! 
The moral of this story is to take Ned's advice and backup your hard drive!!!  ;D  ;D 

Thanks again, Ned.     

Liz Pearce

 

[Ned]

Another believer   Consider getting an external USB hard drive for your backups so you do them more frequently.  Even I would think twice about burning 18 CDs for a backup.

 

[Jackliz]

Another believer   Consider getting an external USB hard drive for your backups so you do them more frequently.  Even I would think twice about burning 18 CDs for a backup.

YEAH!  Which brands should we consider?  Any idea of cost?

Thanks,
Liz and Jack

 

[Jackliz]

P.S.  How could we use one external hard drive to back up both laptops? 

Thanks,
Liz

 

[Ned]

Any of the externals should work, but be sure you have USB 2 ports on the 2 computers.  USB 1 is way too slow.

Get a large enough one to hold the TI image files for both computers and make 2 folders, one for each computer.  I would do a full image backup say, once a week, and incrementals until the next week.  I use a 200GB removeable hard drive to backup my partitions and get 2 weeks of backups on it.

 

[Jackliz]

Any of the externals should work, but be sure you have USB 2 ports on the 2 computers.  USB 1 is way too slow.

Uhhhhh, how do I determine if I have a USB 2 port?

Thanks,
Jack

 

[Ned]

Check the specs for the computer.  If you plug a USB 2.0 device in a USB 1 port, Windows will popup a window telling you about it too.

 

[Jackliz]

OK on the USB 2 port. My laptop has one.

Now, what is  NTFS??

Thanks,
Jack

 

[Karl]

Now, what is  NTFS??

NT File System. It uses a different system of indexing file entries (Doesn't use FAT - File Allocation Tables), is much faster finding things and uses 4k blocks for data instead of 64k blocks. Much more stingy on storage space and a whole lot more reliable. Always use NTFS; not FAT when formatting a new disk.

 

[Ned]

What Karl said.  Always format your hard drives with NTFS for use with Windows XP.  It's not only fast, it's more economical of drive space, particularly on todays huge drives, and it's much safer.  I've never lost any data on an NTFS volume that wasn't recovered with a chkdsk.

 

[Jackliz]

What Karl said.  Always format your hard drives with NTFS for use with Windows XP.  It's not only fast, it's more economical of drive space, particularly on todays huge drives, and it's much safer.  I've never lost any data on an NTFS volume that wasn't recovered with a chkdsk.

Thank you, Karl and Ned.

How can I find out if the hard drive in my laptop has been formatted with NTFS? 

Thanks,
Jack

 

[Ned]

Right click on it in My Computer, select Properties and the file system will be shown on the General tab.

 

[TheDude]

Even I would think twice about burning 18 CDs for a backup.

WOW! 18 CD's

Here are some choices for a USB backups, (top ones are just enclosures, make sure it has at least 50gig media drive) and there are others around. Not to expensive considering what it does.

Does a new install of XP allow for a FAT16 file system? I know it does if its an upgrade from Win98

 

[Ned]

Since FAT16 is limited to 2GB per partition, XP won't even fit, so the answer is no   It does support FAT32 but there is no reason to not use NTFS.

 

[TheDude]

Sorry, I meant FAT32. and the FATxx file system doesnt even capare to the NTFS file system, for a microsoft product anyways....

;D ;D

Tim

 

[Shayne]

I don't even know what NTFS files are let alone how to use them.  I got more than I can handle with XP and soninlaw want to put in XP office on my desktop.  I lost with this.

 

[Ned]

Shayne,

Don't worry about it.  When you install XP defaults to using the NTFS file system.  Office XP doesn't care about the file system, it will work equally well on NTFS or FAT32 if that's what you have.  If your computer came with XP preinstalled, it's using NTFS.

 

[Karl]

Simple answer is that NTFS works behind the scenes and is transparent to the user. You don't have to change anything you are doing now. If upgrading the operating system from Windows 95 or 98 to Windows 2000 or XP, it will ask you if you want to reformat the files to NTFS. The correct answer is "Yes".

 

[Shayne]

Thank you Yes it was XP preinstalled.  I'll just do it and whatever it does it does I guess.  I just can't seem to get a grap on all this Greek stuff.

 

[Ned]

Not to worry Shane, you have us