Back from the dead

[Stephen]

My hard drive went to la-la land.

The reason, I discovered, was some bad memory that a friend gave me that was slowly corrupting files until it finally hit the registry and that was all she wrote.

Slapped the old memory in, bought a 250gig HD and I'm rocking and rolling.

Gonna take forever to reinstall everything!

-Stephen

 

[MichaelJ]

The only problem with a 250gig drive is that it's still a single point of failure, and given the size an even more dangerious one.

Get a second one and set up a raid mirror.

(I'm off to Sunday River ... back late Sunday night ... woot!)

 

[cbcbd]

Yeah, MichaelJ's right. Unfortunately hard drives are just not reliable enough for storage anymore and the only way to not lose your files once in a while is to set up raid or just start backing up everything you have to DVDs, CDs, or Optical media...

A tip for quick reinstallations: If you get Norton Ghost you can make make an image of a drive which you can use for future reinstalls - I made an image of the basic OS, so reinstallation just involves pushing the image on the drive, and that just takes minutes.

edit: I've lost a lot of valuable data to hard drive crashes, not fun

 

[Stephen]

I have a new motherboard that supports raid 0 and 1, just waiting for the other parts before I build the system.

-Stephen

 

[MichaelJ]

Excellent.

And don't forget the UPS!