On: 07 Oct 03  21:14:00 Bill Birrell wrote to Roger Scudder:

 > I've had a day of it. 

 Hey Bill, my appologies for taking so long to reply.

 > It started beautifully, and then I went to C\Bedford and spent #100.00 or 
 > near enough on consumables like CDs, boxes, pens, printer inks, 8cm CD-Rs, 
 > and things of that ilk.
 
 Ouch...  I hope you were able to obtain fair pricing on those items.  

 >     Got home and started a Norton Ghost backup of the hard disk - all 40GB of 
 > it. That ran through fine until the end about 3 hours later (and 14
CD-Rs). Then 
 > it wouldn't boot XM. Ho-hum.
 >     Put in the XM CD and repaired the OS - fiddlesticks! nothing
worked. Formatted 
 > the hard disk and tried to restore the system from the CDs. CRC
failures. (on the 
 > same CD that wrote it). Waste of 14 CDs and three hours.

 I have had similar experiences with Ghost.  It is good for things like
making Win2K installation CDs with sysprep, but you really have to make
sure everything is exactly right.

When I want to change my system around (and I change it around often) I
never try to preserve the OS state, It's just too messy of a chore.  What I
do is to backup all of my documents, bookmarks (or favorites),
addressbooks, as well as any 3RD party installation software that I
downloaded, and anything else that I was to carry over to the new
installation on to CD-R disks.  Then I do fresh OS installs and restore the
files.

 >     Now I've formatted the hard disk again and started from scratch
again. That means 
 > I only have about 60 MB to download again from Microsoft and have to
go through 
 > the mausea of activating it yet again.

That's nothing if you have a Cable Modem or similar broadband access.  If
you're using dial-up it's a major pita!...  and that activation stuff is
enough to make me want to stick with Win2K.

 >     Anyhow this time I've left a 1 GB partition on the hard disk that
can be either for 
 > Win98 or Dos or OS/2, depending which is less trouble to load. Win98 sounds 
 > favourite, but it would be nice to get OS/2 running again on a decent machine.

It is definitely do-able.  The important thing, no, the critical thing, is
to install the system in the right order.  The general rule of thumb is to
install in chronological order, least to most recent.  It can be made
easier with a product like System Commander, which also comes wrapped with
powerful partitioning software (much better than Partition Magic IMHO).

 >     I hope this will solve the FidoNet problem. It should.
 > I'm dreading downloading all that stuff again. Fortunately I saved most of my 
 > non-windows downloads to CD, so it's not as bad as it could be.

I sure hope you get everything worked out a.s.a.p.  :-)

 >     I wonder if this is going to be the last disaster?

It won't be, simply because computers, in particular computer storage
devices, are bound to fail at some point.  If you want full system state
recovery, I suggest you file Ghost and invest in a good DAT4 tape drive. 
:-)

-Roger

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