1237d511bcdf
c_echo



Hello Bill - 

BB> I've had a day of it. It started beautifully, and then ... 

--8<--cut 

BB> Got home and started a Norton Ghost backup of the hard disk
BB> - all 40GB of it. That ran through fine until the end about
BB> 3 hours later (and 14 CD-Rs). Then it wouldn't boot XM. 

I've read that you shouldn't burn for more than 2 hours without
a 45 minute 'cool down' for the burner. 

BB> Ho-hum. Put in the XM CD and repaired the OS -
BB> fiddlesticks! nothing worked. Formatted the hard disk and
BB> tried to restore the system from the CDs. CRC failures. (on
BB> the same CD that wrote it). Waste of 14 CDs and three hours. 

I never do backups directly to CDs for this reason and that I
cannot verify the data on the CD either. 

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

The Service Packs can be downloaded to your system and
installed manually. The advantage being that when something
like this happens you can have them on a CD and not have to
re-download them. 

BB> Anyhow this time I've left a 1 GB partition on the hard
BB> disk that can be either for Win98 or Dos or OS/2, depending
BB> which is less trouble to load. Win98 sounds favourite, but
BB> it would be nice to get OS/2 running again on a decent
BB> machine. I hope this will solve the FidoNet problem. It
BB> should. I'm dreading downloading all that stuff again.
BB> Fortunately I saved most of my non-windows downloads to CD,
BB> so it's not as bad as it could be. 

I keep copies of everything burned to CDs. 

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

I totally trashed my OS partition 12 times trying to get W2K
stable here. Does that help? ;-) 

I would put at least two partitions on the drive. That way you
can image copy from one to the other then burn those images
separately onto CDs one at a time (assuming you tell the image
copier to keep them 'CD sized'). 

My W2K OS only takes up about 2 gig (with added 3rd party
apps). I would think a 5 gig partition would be plenty for the
OS? That way making an image copy isn't such a daunting task
each time and it can fit on 3 CDs. 

If you want those other OS I would do the same, maybe 3 gig
each and one large partition to image-copy to of whatever
remains. 

BootitNG ($35 trialware) would help you arrange this and
perform a boot sequence from any of the OS you want to install. 

Good luck. 

>
>        ,                          ,
>      o/      Charles.Angelich      \o       ,
>       __o/
>     / >          USA, MI           < \   __\__
 

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