|
Page 2 Diablo Blue February, 2002 |
|
Over the last few years my backup scheme under Windows 98 and Me was place a second hard drive in my computer, format it and then go to “Start”, “Run” and “XCOPY C:\*.* /E/H/K/R/C d:”. I did this before any major program was installed and about every two weeks as a general backup. I then pulled the duplicate hard drive out and stored it. Total time to do this was 50 minutes or so for a total backup. Then if a program installation messed up the operating system, or I got a virus, I could replace the corrupted hard drive with the duplicate, boot up and was immediately back in business and may have only lost 1-2 weeks of data. And usually those files could be safely taken off the corrupted hard drive. This worked and was free. Then somewhere along the line it stopped working, so I bought PowerQuest Drive Image 4.0 at a DVDG user group meeting and after having to read the manual, I was able to easily accomplish the same duplication of my hard rive under Windows Me. I had to read the manual because the Disk to Disk Imaging process is not intuitive, not straight-forward, and not self explanatory. But once I actually read it, it worked fine. Recently got a new computer running Windows XP Home Edition and purchased PowerQuest Drive Image 5.0 as required for XP. I tried exactly the same process as I had been doing to duplicated my Windows Me hard drives on my Windows XP machine. But when I tried to boot up the new hard drive, the computer froze at the welcome screen. After a downloaded update to version 5.01 and another attempt, still no success. A trip to the PowerQuest web site and message to Tech Support plus a 5 day wait brought the message that the “Master Boot Record” was not being copied to the new hard drive, that copying the master boot record to the hard drive was not done by default and they gave me the solution. Question: Why would copying the Master Boot Record NOT be done by default when choosing the option to “replace” the hard drive rather than backup option. Or why isn’t this an option to chose, rather than having to discover this the hard way? |
|
Changing drive letters in Windows XP is very easy; it’s just very different than in Windows 98. Here’s how you do it: Click on Start and select Run from the pop-up menu. In the Run dialog box enter: diskmgmt.msc and press Enter. The Disk Management window will open. You will see two panes; the top pane has a list of your disk volumes, and the lower pane shows the format of each disk drive including hard disks, removable disks, and CD, CD-R/RW, and DVD drives. To change the drive letter of a drive, right-click on the drive or volume in the lower pane that shows the current drive letter, and select “Change Drive Letter and Paths…” from the pop-up menu. Click the “Change…” button, make your changes, and click OK twice to return to the Drive Management window, and exit Drive Management. |
|
Eraser Version 5.3 is a free program everyone should own. Eraser overwrites files and empty disk space with carefully selected patterns to remove the magnetic remnants from the hard disk. It repeats this process several times, making it virtually impossible to recover the data Using this product is extremely simple. Simply click in Windows Explorer with the right mouse button on a particular file, and choose the menu item “Erase”. This right-click feature itself |