Re: OT: Hard disk mirror with Paragon on USB stick?

Martin Brown wrote:
Joerg wrote:
Hello All,

The hard drive in my wife's laptop seems to be on its last leg. Motor spools up to less than half the rpm and stays there (pretty constantly). After an hour of warm-up a power cycle usually brings it to life at full rpm. Sound like it'll croak soon. No XP disks came with this machine, meaning I must mirror :-(

Are you sure there isn't a "system restore" CD or something with words
to that effect that includes a custom version of Doze that will only
work with that brand / model of portable PC and is preconfigured?
(NB it may not show any obvious MS markings even for main brands)


A lot of disks came with it but not that one. There were these disks:

Client drivers
WordPerfect
DVD drivers
Some Cyberlink DVD stuff
Microsoft Money


If you have a valid activation code for XP registered to this machine
you should in principle at least be able to reinstall from any XP CD
with the usual pain and suffering of installing FP1, FP2 and FP3 too.


There is a really long MS XP product key number but no XP CD.


Wise to do the first two offline, a pre FP1 version of XP would not
last long enough to do anything on the internet these days before it
was harvested by a botnet.
I tried installing "Paragon Drive Backup 9.0 Express" on a USB stick but it must have written DLLs to this PC's drive. Darn. Meaning it does not start off a USB stick. But it has to because the laptop will have to get off the ground with a completely empty new hard drive.

Has anyone ever sucessfully run Paragon off a USB stick? Or a CD?

It ought to work provided that you booted from the USB stick or CD.
Otherwise all sorts of registry settings will end up in the machine
registry of the OS that booted the system. The days when you could
copy a program onto removable media and expect it to run are long
gone.


I am afraid it did those registry entries without asking when I installed it on the stick.


If you count your time into the equation the quickest cheapest
solution is buy a suitably big external HD and mirror the old portable
drive onto it with Paragon already installed on the portable. Make the
external HD the primary boot media to check it and then remove and
replace the half dead drive. Mirror it back and you are done - at
least in theory.


Afraid it's too late. The laptop did not get off the ground this morning. The equivalent of finding a huge puddle of transmission fluid under your car :-(


If the USB drive is big enough you could do the same with that but
64GB thumbnail drives are still a bit pricy so it's more expensive.

And even then it may still be more cost effective to buy a new
portable. The cute 10" micro laptops are going for about £250 here for
Xmas, and their bigger cousins for about £100 more for a decent
specimen.


I just bought a $500 version, arrived two days ago. Samsung NC-10, typed an OO document yesterday night. Remaining battery capacity 87%. Sweet!

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
.

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