November, 2000      Diablo Blue      Page 3

The last issue of Diablo Blue had an article claiming to be the opposite of this column by George Griffith. For the lack of a better name, I'll call it the Pollyanna column... For those of you long departed from your childhood, let me remind you that Pollyanna was an orphan girl who, despite the difficulties of her life, is always extremely cheerful. (An early twentieth century book by American author Eleanor H. Porter.)
Now, in the last issue the Pollyanna column told of an isolated three occurrences of computer vendors who did right by their customers. Let me repeat -- there were ONLY three occurrences of this anomaly. I've been writing this column for several years now and have reached a total of twelve articles. Each of those covered at least two vendors and described their crimes against the computer user. That's some twenty four vendors. Pollyanna, aka George Griffith, covered three -- so to reach the break-even point he still has some twenty one good guys to find, a very daunting task in your Official Curmudgeon's opinion.
Okay Pollyanna... sorry, I mean George... the ball is in your court. Can you rise to the challenge?

After several meltdowns I have decided to do some research into the subject of Back Up. The major back up programs that I looked at were: CD Res-Q, Plextor; Norton Ghost 2001, Symantec; Drive Image 4, Power Quest.
These products have a lot in common. You can not copy all of Windows when it is running because part of it is in operation all the time. The way out is to resort to DOS MODE. This way they can access the entire contents of your C:\ drive because Windows is not running. The way is to do this is to select "Restart in MS-DOS Mode" from Windows' Start-Shutdown. Now you can go to the C:\ drive and read, and copy, anything that's there. You may have to make your own floppy boot disk, or the back up program may have deal to facilitate this. This floppy boot should also load the drivers to run the CD-ROM drive, and it's most flexible if the CD drive is a burner [CD recorder]. With the backup program you can copy a image of your operating system, so in case of irreversible failure all you do is insert the boot floppy [on some computers you can copy the boot track right onto the CD and boot from the CD]. Now boot to "A" drive, actuate the backup program, and your back up CD will rewrite your hard drive to go back to before the goof.

1. CD Res-Q is the simplest because its designed by Plextor, a CD manufacture. They adapted Symantec's system to burn an exact Image of your partition, disk, drive, or file, and then it let's you reinstall this back to your hard drive.
   
2. Norton Ghost will do the same thing, but is a much broader field of service. Such as, you can up grade your hard drive to a new hard drive. Supports disk compression, Network peer top peer, LPT and USB peer to peer Diskette, CD-ROM boot disk, etc. A program with many uses.
   
3. Drive Image does a lot of the same things that Ghost does. But first they have you run a program to make two boot up floppies which includes a wizard to initiate the back up program, but this wizard has blank spaces to write in paths etc. If you don't get the exact syntax, nothing happens. The instructions in this part of the program are really lacking. Drive Image has some elements from Partition Magic, so you can do some elementary partition work also.