Re: This is what we did here 12 years ago

On Wed, 04 Apr 2007 17:39:51 -0800, Offbreed
<offbreed_106@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Lawrence Glickman wrote:

I tried to get Spinrite to do a level 4 or 5 last night. Guess what?
The *new in the box* floppies I bought from K Mart last year wouldn't
even _format_. I had to toss them in the trash can.

The cheap floppies are not worth buying. The expensive ones, are they
even around any more?

I wish this MoBo booted from USB. It's one of the few reasons to
upgrade, and I would have if there wasn't so blasted many MoBo's to
choose from. Passed time for the industry to shake out the also rans.

Exactly so!!! I tried for a long time to get the BIOS upgrade that
would allow my mobo to boot from a USB thumb drive, but found out that
it would be less expensive to buy an entirely new mobo with the BIOS
already installed.

Man, what a screw job. And not only that, I can't boot from my CD ROM
with FreeDos. Because, first of all, the OS thinks it is a
non-removable drive, and secondly because it doesn't have a FAT and
file structure ( it's a blank CD ). And there isn't any way I can
think of to give it a FAT and file structure, except maybe by writing
a couple of nonsense files to it and seeing, by experiment, if a FAT
magically appears out of nowhere in the process.

All of this is more headache than it is worth. I am sticking with
Acronis True Image which does boot from CD ROM, and runs the restore
program from any USB peripheral. This is the best solution I've been
able to come up with yet, and I think I've investigated about all of
them.

Now I don't have version 8 of Acronis; they want $30 for an upgrade.
Opps, sorry, don't have that in my pocket at the moment. But that Ver
8 is for network setups, and I don't have that to deal with anyhow.
Just have a single desktop computer here...no reason to spend money I
don't have on something I don't need.

So, from everything I've been able to research, it seems that
refreshing media by copying off / copying back is the expedient way to
keep things working properly. Then again, barring any hardware
failures, which certainly have happened to myself.

My Image for my computer is 31 GIGAbytes in size. That would take a
pile of DVD's to hold. So I'm using a 120 Gig USB drive for that at
the moment. It goes off line for protection as soon as a backup is
made. Takes about 40 minutes to back up my entire system, and about
the same to do a full restore, including the OS.

One day there will be a better way to do things, but I don't know if
we'll live to see it.

Lg

.

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