First Known Drive Software Casualty

[kevin_standlee]

For reasons unclear other than the massive donations to the Ghod Murphy by buying a third hard drive and spending many hours in clone after clone, the problem with my drives not booting has not recurred. But today I found the first piece of software that is gone and for which I can no longer find the installation disk: Paint Shop Pro, which I use for basic photo editing, cropping, etc. I had Dell PSP Studio, which Corel no longer supports, so I had to buy the newest version (they did recognize me as a past customer, so I got the upgrade price rather than the new-user price). Phooey. I hope there aren't any other significant applications that I've not noticed.

A couple of days ago, I copied all of the identified installation files (not including PSP, which I just downloaded tonight) that were on the salvaged hard drives to a Data DVD. And I'm running drive clones at least daily, always cloning to the older of the two backup clones.

I ran the entire slate of Dell diagnostic tests on this machine (I found the bootable diagnostics disk) and there's no tests failing. Every since I've run those tests, I've had no more problems with a drive failing to boot. But it continues to make me nervous.

Comments

[janusfiles.livejournal.com]

Send in the clones . . .

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Quite. Right now I'm swapping hard drives every day or two, cloning drive A to B, swapping in B (making A the backup), then repeating with B to C, then C back to A. Tiresome, really, especially because I only have two hard drive carriers and only one IDE-to-Dell-drive adapter. All of this fiddling about with those IDE connectors makes me nervous about breaking a pin.

[lindadee.livejournal.com]

I'll probably get shot for this but: why don't you just leave a single hard drive in your computer and back up to an external hard drive? Less grief for you.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Because the only way I know that the clone was successful is to boot from the cloned drive. Remember that the original problem is that drives (and their clones) wouldn't boot, even though you could read all of the data on them.