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

Charlie E. wrote:
On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:45:26 -0800, Joerg
<notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Charlie E. wrote:
On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:30:21 -0800, Joerg
<notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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!
Jeorge,
Just a question on your NC-10. How are the speakers, if any, on it?
My wife might be needing a new machine soon, but she has to have
decent sound. She's blind, you see, and does everything through a
screen reader...

Sorry to hear that. At least your wife has a tech-savvy husband who can find the best tools for her. Does she have a guide dog? (We sometimes help raising them)

I don't use my PCs for audio much, only CAD, writing specs and such so I don't know how audio should sound on a PC. Speech comes over quite well (just tried pastor's sermon). Also tried the country station WSM Online and it sounds ok. But as expected low frequencies don't sound too great considering the tiny speakers in there. Also not very loud so in a noisy environment this machine might not work for her.

I closed my eyes and tried to feel my way across the keyboard. The J has the usual bar. It can't be felt as pronounced as on other keyboards because the NC-10 keys are rounded in front. But I guess you could add some material there if needed so it becomes more recognizable. The machine is so small that I always felt its corners so that might be a good guidance as well.

The camera in the NC-10 is quite good, located right above the screen. I held a receipt in front of it and the result appears to be good enough for a decent OCR program to extract the information. Depends on the light situation, of course. Wish they had placed a could LEDs there.

There is also integrated Bluetooth. I cannot try that out because I don't have any Bluetooth devices (yet) but this could provide untethered audio tranfer to an ear set or head set.

Some things in its electronic manual are a bit strange. For example, it says there is a multi card slot but other than a plastic insert that won't come out I don't see anything there.

What convinced me to buy this netbook is the battery runtime. I have no idea what a spare would cost but it's been well over 4h now and the battery manager shows 45% remaining. It'll break the old Compaq Contura's 6h benchmark although that took the computer industry about 1.5 decades.

Sounds like it might work for her. She doesn't need it real loud, but
needs fairly clean speech from the screen reader. She has small
hands. so likes smaller keyboards. Doesn't need the camera, but might
find a use for the bluetooth stuff...


The audio is pretty crisp and easy to understand, certainly for something like books on tape (or on data in this case). Remember that this and most other netbooks do not have an internal CD/DVD drive. And I haven't figured out yet whether it has a multi-card slot and if so, how to open it.

The camera is standard. Could come in quite handy if you are gone and she wants you to take a quick look at something.

Another advantage of this netbook in comparison to other budget machines is the huge hard disk space. It has a 160GB drive which by default gets partionioned into two 80GB sections. You can't have that with silicon disks (yet). So your wife could store lots of stuff one there and then listen to it out in the backyard or somewhere away from the screen reader. From a nearly blind friend I remember those as rather big machines.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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

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