Best External Hdd

On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 10:41:56 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

Yes I use Acronis and it's great.

I wonder if it will clone an NTFS partition
to a FAT32 partition for a boot drive.

No, but their Disk Director Suite will.

I will have a look.


--

"Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverence. Talent
will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education
will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and
determination alone are omnipotent."
--Calvin Coolidge

On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 10:52:07 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

Each partition has a unique "signature" which Windows uses
to mount the device driver for that disk. That saves having to set
up the driver each time. It also prevents cloning because Windows
will BSOD if there are two disks with identical signatures.

XP doesnt BSOD in that situation.

That's good to know.

Win98SE has a bug in FDISK /MBR which overwrites the first 4 bytes of
the signature. That forces Windows to abandon previous drivers and create
a new one. It creates a new signature and a driver to go along with it.

It doesnt have separate drivers either.

If I use the Windows Defrag utility, I get two entries per partition.
One has the drive identifier plus the disk label I assigned, and the
other just has the drive identifier. Thus I get these two entries for
the boot disk:

C: System
C:

This also happens in a third party defragger called Perfect Disk. In
that utility I can query the "volume GUID" and it is different for
each of the entries. That seems to imply that Win2K is attaching 2
device drivers to the partition, one the normal device driver with its
disk label and another one which does not include the disk label.

What is going on?


--

"Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverence. Talent
will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education
will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and
determination alone are omnipotent."
--Calvin Coolidge

On Thu, 19 Oct 2006 15:50:00 -0400, CBFalconer
wrote:

Citizen Bob, could you elaborate on what you mean by "changing the
signature" when you use Acronis True Image Server to make full disk
images? thanks.

Please don't top-post. Your answer belongs after, or possibly
intermixed with, the material you quote. After snipping whatever
is not germane to your reply.

I gave up on my crusade to stomp out top posting. It's hopeless.

There is no accounting for the incredible stupidity of most of the
human race except to assume the great apes messed around with sheep.


--

"Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverence. Talent
will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education
will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and
determination alone are omnipotent."
--Calvin Coolidge

Citizen Bob wrote
Rod Speed wrote

There are real downsides with using cloning for backup,
particularly its much too easy to clone backwards
and overwrite what you are trying to backup.

Not if you put a physical label on the disks.

Not even possible to see that with most systems.

The cloning procedure requires the use of removable drive bays.

No it doesnt.

Therefore I put the label on the front of the disk tray.

I dont bother with disk trays.

Makes a lot more sense to use a decent modern incremental
imager and have it look after all that stuff auto and completely
eliminate any possibility of cloning backwards.

MUCH faster too.

I am sure it is. But I do not trust it.

Your choice.

I was unable to get Acronis to operate in that mode.

Works fine for me.

I did not spend the time to chase it down,
since I wanted to do cloning instead.

More fool you. It makes a lot more sense to use incremental images instead
for a variety of reasons, so you should have worked out how to do that.

Fraid so when you dont have the drives in removable bays and
prefer to have the backup drive in another PC across the lan etc.

I thought Acronis TI would do LAN disk clones.

Nope, the clone has to be local.

Neither should you, you should be using a decent modern incremental
imager instead so you get the backup done much more quickly as a
bonus and you dont have to fart around with removable drives either.

Once you bin the removable drive bays, the backup can be completely
automated and you dont have to wait around for it to happen either.
Just check that the automated backup did work properly after the event.

I prefer keeping the disks in a location away from the computer.
If I do imaging with disks permanently mounted in the computer,
I take the risk that something could happen to them.

Not if the disks are on other PC on the lan. You
can have that in a fireproof safe etc if you want to.

Citizen Bob wrote
Rod Speed wrote

Each partition has a unique "signature" which Windows uses
to mount the device driver for that disk. That saves having to set
up the driver each time. It also prevents cloning because Windows
will BSOD if there are two disks with identical signatures.

XP doesnt BSOD in that situation.

That's good to know.

Win98SE has a bug in FDISK /MBR which overwrites
the first 4 bytes of the signature. That forces Windows
to abandon previous drivers and create a new one. It
creates a new signature and a driver to go along with it.

It doesnt have separate drivers either.

If I use the Windows Defrag utility, I get two entries per partition.
One has the drive identifier plus the disk label I assigned, and the
other just has the drive identifier. Thus I get these two entries for
the boot disk:

C: System
C:

Something is seriously screwed, presumably you produced that
result by molesting the signatures and by cloning instead of imaging.

This also happens in a third party defragger called Perfect Disk.

Thats not surprising, the OS has got it radically wrong.

In that utility I can query the "volume GUID" and it is
different for each of the entries. That seems to imply
that Win2K is attaching 2 device drivers to the partition,

There are no separate drivers.

one the normal device driver with its disk label and
another one which does not include the disk label.

What is going on?

You've stuffed things up by molesting the signatures and by cloning.

Citizen Bob wrote:
CBFalconer wrote:

Citizen Bob, could you elaborate on what you mean by "changing the
signature" when you use Acronis True Image Server to make full disk
images? thanks.

Please don't top-post. Your answer belongs after, or possibly
intermixed with, the material you quote. After snipping whatever
is not germane to your reply.

I gave up on my crusade to stomp out top posting. It's hopeless.

There is no accounting for the incredible stupidity of most of the
human race except to assume the great apes messed around with sheep.

With some. Others are just ill-informed, or seduced by the silly
actions of Outhouse Excess and/or googoogroups. Those can be
taught, for example by the links below. However I agree that the
supply of top posters is unending.

--
Some informative links:
news:news.announce.newusers
http://www.geocities.com/nnqweb/
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/

On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 18:54:29 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

The cloning procedure requires the use of removable drive bays.

No it doesnt.

I meant to say "the cloning procedure *I use* involves removable drive
bays." I want the backup clones out of the computer so they will be
safe.

Therefore I put the label on the front of the disk tray.

I dont bother with disk trays.

Then you run the risk, however small, that something can happen to the
backup images.

I was unable to get Acronis to operate in that mode.

Works fine for me.

That's because you are running XP and I am running 2K.

I remember once trying an eval copy of an application which the
developers claimed ran on 2K. It crashed immediately. I wrote them and
they replied that they had to do some work on it and would get back to
me if I was willing to do beta test. Three months later they sent me a
new version, which I binned because I had given up on them. Three
months to get it running on 2K.

There are problems with using XP apps on 2K.

I did not spend the time to chase it down,
since I wanted to do cloning instead.

More fool you.

I don't think it is foolish. I am certainly not the only one using
removable drives to do archive clones. I could say it is foolish to
leave your backups in the computer where something can destroy them.

It makes a lot more sense to use incremental images instead
for a variety of reasons, so you should have worked out how to do that.

Incremental images make you fish around too much. I use differential
since only a small number of files get changed after I do a clone -
something like about 177 files. That's trivial for NTBackup.

Between clones I use NTBackup to make differential images each morning
at 4:00 am and lay the backup file on D: drive. That way I can recover
if I have to go back to a previous disk. In fact I had to do that this
morning since Acronis Disk Director has a very serious bug and I lost
my boot disk.

In the forst place Disk Director won't convert NTFS to FAT32. When it
found I had NTFS it greyed out the Convert. So I decided to uninstall
it and when I rebooted it, the OS Director that got installed fussed
about not having the proper files. Obviously the uninstall did not
remove the OS Director call. It said to push the "OK" button to
continue, but when I did, it shut the computer off. ****ing idiots.

So I got a clone I had made yesterday and restored all the files that
had been backed up to D: at 4:00 am. The clone disk was now like new.

If I am in the middle of the day and plan a major undertaking that
could result in an unusable disk, I make a clone if it has been a
while or I force a backup so I can use the clone I made recently.

Nope, the clone has to be local.

That is not an issue for me. Both my children have graduated and are
now living in their own houses, so there is only my wife and me with
computers. I have no need to backup her machine.

Not if the disks are on other PC on the lan. You
can have that in a fireproof safe etc if you want to.

I am not worried about that kind of disaster. I am more concerned with
either something happening with the computer to corrupt the disks. By
keeping the archive clones out of the machine, I circumvent that
possibility. Plus I want to keep three disks and rotate them. If I
mounted them internally I would only have one IDE channel left which I
would use for the DVD burner - so I would be maxed out. Then I would
not have a channel for the backup disk - the one I keep the
differential archive on. I suppose I could use one of the clone disks
but then I can't keep a copy outside the machine.

I just feel better having the clones out of the computer. I have close
to 100 applications installed over a 10 year period (I started with
NT4 in 1996 and used IPU to migrate to Win2K). I do not want to
rebuild that boot disk from scratch, even though I have carefully
archived every application I ever loaded so I could if forced to.

There are numerous UNIX machines that still have the original install
of the operating system. It is absurd to have to rebuild an OS from
scratch every year or two. Even VAX/VMS - from which NT was stolen -
did not need periodic reinstalls.


--

"Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverence. Talent
will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education
will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and
determination alone are omnipotent."
--Calvin Coolidge

On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 19:20:45 +1000, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

Something is seriously screwed, presumably you produced that
result by molesting the signatures and by cloning instead of imaging.

The problem arose before I discovered the signature alteration
technique with Win98. And cloning should not cause Win2K to go beserk
or else Acronis needs to remove TI from the 2K market.

This also happens in a third party defragger called Perfect Disk.

Thats not surprising, the OS has got it radically wrong.

That's because it is Windows.

You've stuffed things up by molesting the signatures and by cloning.

Signature molesting came after the OS was corrupted. I once tested
RAID 0 and I suspect the installation software was what corrupted the
OS. I have scoured the Registry looking for any evidence of the old
code but have not found any. I have also removed all hard disk device
drivers and their references in the Registry.

Is it possible that the RAID install buggered the BIOS? Is there a
RAID key in the BIOS?

What amazes me is no one can figure out what is wrong here, not even
Microsoft MVP types. Apparently it is a problem no one has confronted
before. I have been fighting it for over a year and I am determined to
find out what is causing it.

I am hoping that by converting to FAT32 I may see some very
significant change, which will give a clue what is going on. It's
definitely the NTFS files that are corrupted because CHKDSK reports
problems with security files and the USN Journal, and empty space in
the MFT.

I have been successful in recovering a corrupt disk, even one that
BSODs, by mounting it as D: and running CHKDSK.


--

"Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverence. Talent
will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education
will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and
determination alone are omnipotent."
--Calvin Coolidge

On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 06:52:56 -0400, CBFalconer
wrote:

However I agree that the
supply of top posters is unending.

Most people use email, where ongoing correspondence is best dealt with
by top posting. Then they bring that habit to Usenet under the false
assumption that everyone is their correspondent.


--

"Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverence. Talent
will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education
will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and
determination alone are omnipotent."
--Calvin Coolidge

Citizen Bob wrote:
CBFalconer wrote:

However I agree that the supply of top posters is unending.

Most people use email, where ongoing correspondence is best dealt
with by top posting. Then they bring that habit to Usenet under
the false assumption that everyone is their correspondent.

I disagree with "best dealt with". The same considerations apply.

--
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?