Re: Kids...and Acronis(...and Cable Select?)

This is all assuming you also installed service pack 4 and all the
updates for windows 2000. Without SP4 you've probably got the
welchia, gaobot and/or netsky viruses on there already (or anything
that enjoys the dcom rpc vulnerability).

I like win2k because it is both compatible with XP and can also run on
"older" machines...but it can be flaky.

In my personal experiences, cable select can be very flaky, as well.
I usually jumper IDE hard drives as either a master and then a slave.

Let this be a lesson to him...when he fools around with older
equipment, he's likely to get into trouble (but learn a lot in the
process).

Dan

On 28 Jul 2006 09:04:35 -0700, "Boris" <boris-badenough@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

If only they would listen.

I brough home an old Dell G110, PIII, circa Jan. 2001, from work last
night for my 15 year old son to use as a second machine to play Halo
with a friend. (He also wants to use it later as his second Linux box,
but first as a Windows machine.) We spent many hours resurecting it
with spare parts around the house; a new processor (1gHz), nVidia card,
NIC, 512MB RAM, CD-R and CD-RW. Not the most up to date stuff, but at
least they could "poon some nubes" this afternoon, after a long day at
summer school.

The machine had the original 20GB Quantum Fireball hard drive, and we
installed Windows 2000 Pro (NTFS, single partition) on it just to see
how the machine would work after all of our so-called upgrades. It
worked just fine.

I also had a still-in-the-box 80 GB Western Digital hard drive that I
bought the night before to install in this machine, if we got the
machine up and running. Since the machine was purring along, and it
was 2 am, I figured my job was done, and I gave him the new 80GB and my
Acronis True Image Home 9.0. I said his 20GB was enough for Halo play
with his friend, and would help him later when I got home to image the
20GB to the 80GB, and swap drives.

Guess he couldn't wait. At around 2:30 am, he stuck his head in my
bedroom door and said he was going to back up the 20GB to the 80GB and
swap. I said no, you have to image. He said but Acronis asked if I
wanted to do a back up, and he said 'yes' to that prompt, and he said
it also partioned the 80GB automatically (he thinks). I said FINE!,
and went back to sleep.

When I got up, 3 hours later, I found the following SOS note on his
bedroom floor:

says "booted 80 gig as slave. tried to switch them around...all the 80
gig does is beep at me. now the 20 gig won't even boot by itself

He left me no POST boot up messages.

CRAP me thinks. I'm at work now, he's asleep.

I'm going to assume, which could be a big mistake, that he has the
jumpers on the two hard drives correct, and the BIOS boot sequence
correct, and has enabled both both primary and secondary drives on the
first IDE channel. I want to assume this because my question is about
Acronis, not the drive setup (even though the problem could be the
drive setup, I'm sort of on a reconnaissance mission for when I get
home, or if he calls me at work).

I once read on an Acronis forum that the image function has been known
to wipe clean the source drive. Can anyone confirm this? Yes, he said
he did a backup, but who knows.

My suspicion is that he's got the drive setup incorrect, either in the
BIOS or with the cables. The Western Digital came with a cable select
cable. If he didn't use that, and used the older IDE cable, but left
the WD jumpered as cable select, would this be the problem? I also
suspect there's no OS on the WD.

I know there's too many variables to determine the cause, but like I
said, I'm in reconnaissance mode. He's quite persistent, and works
hard at problem solving, and I feel bad for him. He was so happy just
to get the 20GB setup running.

If you've read this far, thanks very much.

.

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