Gather 'round, Geeks....

[Rolex]

I'm on the laptop now. It took hours last night to back up the computer on DVDs, and now they are either blank or I get a message that Windows doesn't know what program to open it with.
I'm now doing copy/paste from an external HDD.
This has not been fun, but at least I have someone to complain to instead of kicking out a stained glass window.

 

[mtaylortank]

the last computer that froze up on me too much is sitting behind me right now after it got the football treatment!!!! I figured the old lady and kids had brand new laptops so i didnt really nead that outdated p.o.s. although I do have to admit until I got a good comp with wi-fi it surved its purpose.. good luck rolex and wish you the best of luck!!!

 

[Rolex]

Same ole, same ole. Lengthy battle to get it booted today.
So, if I get the new hard drive, how do I get the OS on it?

 

[bigjay]

I would try installing it in RAID 1 or find a good cloning software.

 

[alien13]

Same ole, same ole. Lengthy battle to get it booted today.
So, if I get the new hard drive, how do I get the OS on it?

Use the install/recovery disk. You may have to call Microsoft to activate the OS, and explain that the hard drive had to be replaced. It really shouldn't be an issue though, as long as the rest of the computer is the same.

 

[Rolex]

Just got back from Office Depot with the new HDD. It was at Tiger Direct for 140 and Office Depot had it for 130 and I had a $20 off card. So $110 took it home. It comes with cloning software on the program disk, and I've also created all the discs needed to copy the OS to the new drive. I should be good to go on this.

 

[hamz9561]

Good luck on the switch over.

 

[CptAwesome]

I would try installing it in RAID 1 or find a good cloning software.

ick

I would stay away from RAID 1, personally

 

[hamz9561]

RAID has its place. I used it on a mission critical AUTOCAD workstation. It paid for itself several months later when the primary hdd took a dump.

 

[CptAwesome]

Oh I agree. But I'm not a fan of RAID 1 or 0. Use 1, and you kill your write performance. Use 0, and you kill your reliability.

RAID 10 might have earned it's place, because at least you get some redundancy without sacrificing performance. For anything mission critical, 5 or 6 is the way to go.

I recently set up a vSphere server that's going to be pushing out anywhere from 100-200 virtual machines, so read/write performance is pretty important in addition to some redundancy. RAID 6 would have been preferred, because of higher fault tolerance, but working with a 2U server that can only hold 8HDDs we had to go with RAID 5. The benchmarks ended up being pretty damn impressive...

 

[Rolex]

Well, I'm on the laptop. The tower has been torn down and the new HDD is ready to go in. I just moved in the last few weeks, and I gave away or threw away many boxes of computer parts. Well, now I had to order a set of rails to fit the drive into a 5 1/4" bay.
Typical, just typical. I'll be leaving the current HDD in there as an internal backup. 560Gb. It seems the only damage on it is part of the system.