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#61
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
Ken Blake, MVP wrote:
On Fri, 12 Jun 2015 12:41:53 -0400, Paul wrote: The boot order must be set in the BIOS. Some PCs are set in this priority order. Floppy Optical drive Hard drive (1 of N) Yes, but my advice is never to leave it set for the floppy or optical drive to come before the hard drive. It's OK to temporarily set it for either of them, but not to leave it that way. That's because it's always possible to accidentally leave an infected floppy or CD in the drive, and therefore get infected when you boot. I've seen that happen more than once. Not a really useful solution on the Dimension 8200 (RAMBUS era computer). On the Dimension 8500, you could define a defensive permanent boot order in the computer (no removable media in the order), and use the "popup boot" key to vector off to the optical drive at boot time. So the 8500 is a good candidate for your advice. On the 8200, you'd end up constantly going into the BIOS to modify things. Will a person always remember how to do that, when they're in trouble and need their Macrium CD to boot ? To make that viable in this case, I would need to: 1) Visit the OPs home. 2) Paste BIOS modification instructions to the side of the computer, so the instructions cannot get lost. Along with the password for the router, the password for the computer accounts, and so on :-) I have such a collection of passwords sitting near my computer (probably 20 or 30 different "random string" passwords, for commerce). Your idea is a useful solution for people who "live in their BIOS setup screen". I don't particularly enjoy messing around in there over and over again, which is why I settle for a "useful" setup, rather than a "secure" setup. On machines with a working popup boot key at POST, I use that even when I don't need to (even for what I know to be a static configuration). but on older machines, I make do with a "useful" BIOS configuration. If it was a kiosk computer, an Internet Cafe computer, or a public library computer, then yes, lock it down. Pour epoxy in the USB connectors, so people cannot infect the computer with their infected USB keys. But this situation is a home user, where the highest thread probability is the connection to the Internet. These machines have already had their share of adware, delivered from the Internet. And the machines are armed to the hilt with tools, because of the recognized threat vector. (The OP knows he has to run a good AV program.) Paul |
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#62
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
Hello Paul,
Tried it again and this time Macrium Reflect came up. So all is good. So now I would like to do backups for both the 8200 and the 8500 using my external HD. If I remember correctly I use Macrium but are there any suggestions for settings etc? I want it so if something happened I can recover everything in minutes. In passing, can you point me to a good download for Quicktime for the 8200? Many Thanks, Robert |
#63
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
Mark Twain wrote:
Hello Paul, Tried it again and this time Macrium Reflect came up. So all is good. So now I would like to do backups for both the 8200 and the 8500 using my external HD. If I remember correctly I use Macrium but are there any suggestions for settings etc? I want it so if something happened I can recover everything in minutes. In passing, can you point me to a good download for Quicktime for the 8200? Many Thanks, Robert The free version of Macrium, does imaging and cloning. The paid version does file by file transfers as far as I know, but since it's the paid version, I've not played with such a feature. For backup, that's the imaging option. When the tool starts, first it nags you about updating to the latest version. (It's possible, in the preferences, you can turn that off.) Next, it takes a few seconds, to scan the PC for disk drives, read the partition table and so on. It displays a picture of all the drives and their partitions. (X) --- MBR Tick box (X) (X) (X) (X) ---- various partition tick boxes If you want to back up the whole drive, you tick all five. The reason it backs up the MBR, is so any OS can boot, and so there is a record of the partition table available. On a restoration, you can probably untick the MBR, if you think for any reason restoring it will damage something. But generally, just leave it ticked. If you change the setup of your partitions (shrink or expand them, make more or fewer), it's generally better to start making a new set of backups, and discard the old .mrimg files. It's probably not absolutely necessary to do that, but once I start backing up my hard drives here, I try not to change the partition setup, so as to not invalidate my backups. Each backup operation, could store things in one .mrimg file. So in the diagram above, with the five tick boxes (implying all the primary partitions are getting backed up), the information may be stored in one .mrimg output file. You get to select a name for the backup, but I just let the files receive their "random number" label and leave it at that. You must select your backup hard drive in Destination, to have the backup stored externally. If you wanted descriptive titling for them, the tool supports a "Comments" field. When you click the "Next" button and go to do your backup, there is an Advanced button that allows you to change the settings on the backup. One of the tabs there is "Comments" and I put something like WinXP Dimension 8200 C: June 13 2015, just before dangerous experiment and later, as long as Macrium is on the computer, if you right click an .mrimg file, you can read those comments back out. As long as you make a "rich" comment field, you can sort through the files later looking for stuff. You also have the option of making your own folder structure, perhaps having a "June 13 2015" folder and putting the backup from the 8200 and 8500 in there. The .mrimg files can be stored anywhere, subject to your ability to figure out later, what is in the backup. And that's where the comment field you add, just before the backup runs, is invaluable. For example, I could just as easily move the .mrimg file into a private folder whose name is WinXP Dimension 8200 C - June 13 2015 While you can do stuff like schedule a repeating backup, I generally run all mine manually, and don't keep the definition of the backup, from one run to the next. I just "Run it now" and create the backup. ******* Later, if you need to restore, you should at least have kept track of what you were doing with the disk drives well enough, to not cause yourself problems. If the partition sizes have not changed, you could restore just one partition from a backup. Or, if the hard drive broke inside the PC, you put a blank hard drive in the PC, you'd want all these tick boxes to come back. (X) --- MBR Tick box (X) (X) (X) (X) ---- various partition tick boxes So you have some control over what partitions are restored. If you know you've screwed up the partition sizes, you might stop and ponder whether you should be restoring the MBR tick box. And, say you lost a single stinking file. You don't have to restore entire partitions. You can right-click the .mrimg file, and select to have it mounted in File Explorer. And you can treat it like it was a disk drive, go down the folders until you find a copy of the missing file. This saves a lot of time when you don't want to restore the entire disk. Once you have recovered the file, you can right-click the volume in My Computer, and Macrium will show an option to dismount the (backup) volume. I used to have a "picture strip" tutorial for Macrium, but I hosted it on Imageshack, and they deleted all their old collection of photos. And that's gone now. And I won't be making another. The Macrium site itself has tutorials, so that's another possibility for reference material. You see, their tutorials really are quite nice... http://kb.macrium.com/KnowledgebaseArticle50074.aspx And to find that, I entered this in Google site:macrium.com how to image And later when you want to learn how to restore, you could do site:macrium.com how to restore ******* For Quicktime, the source is here. Current version is QuickTime 7.7.6 for WinXP, Vista, Win7. Untick the box and don't enter your email address. Then click the blue download button. File is 40MB. http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/ QuickTime installer can have two later "nags" it installs. 1) It will nag to update QuickTime. Well, there hasn't been a new version of QuickTime, for some time. 2) More importantly, a fake nag exhorts you to install iTunes and other assorted baloney. This has nothing to do with QuickTime. I think if you use the Task Scheduler in Control Panels, with a little work you can turn this one off. We've discussed this before at some point. So if you see "Software Updater" window pop up, dismiss it. Or, using Task Scheduler, disable the entry causing that to pop up all the time. HTH, Paul |
#64
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
Hello Paul,
I haven't done the backups yet(tomorrow) but I did download Quicktime and selected a custom download so that I could edit it and un-ticked their automatic updates. Works great. Also, the fan starts on it's own 50% of the time now, so that's a good sign but I still have to check it. I'll let you know how the updates went. Many thanks for all your good help and taking the time and patience to explain things so that I and others reading can understand better. You do allot of good work here and your knowledge is profound yet you explain things in simple terms so others can understand and give wonderful links. Many Thanks, Robert |
#65
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
Hello Paul,
I tried doing a backup with Macrium but it failed twice. It says backup aborted - write operation failed, The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. I've had the external HD plugged in from the beginning and followed the steps in the link you provided. Robert |
#66
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
Mark Twain wrote:
Hello Paul, I tried doing a backup with Macrium but it failed twice. It says backup aborted - write operation failed, The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. I've had the external HD plugged in from the beginning and followed the steps in the link you provided. Robert Hmmm. Now, how am I going to figure out what broke that ? :-) I'm sure if the external drive ran out of space, there would have been a different, more descriptive error. So that's probably not it. USB hard drives can certainly "go to sleep", but since Macrium writes at 50MB/sec, the drive never gets a chance to go idle. It can't park the heads and act stupid. So that's probably not it. Where does that leave us ? What's left, except a bad drive ? Maybe we should review the drive type information. Is this a 3.5" drive, with an external power supply ? The power on those, is usually a bit more reliable than 2.5" bus powered laptop-style drives. If the drive was bus powered, and the bus resettable fuse opened, that would mimic an I/O failure. Tell me more about the drive. If you bought the drive and enclosure as a package, then the whole kit would have a part number. If you bought an empty enclosure, a bare drive, and assembled it with a screwdriver, then you'd have a model number for the enclosure and a model number for the hard drive used. If the drive is easy to remove from the enclosure, you could move it inside the computer. This is probably easier on the 8500 than the 8200, as the 8200 won't have any SATA ports to use. For a basic health check, you could install HDTune free version, and run a read benchmark. On a decent drive, inside a USB2 enclosure, the benchmark trace should be a ~30MB/sec flat line. As the drive is always faster than the USB bus in that case, so the USB bus limits the transfer rate. http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe While some would yell out "use the Seagate tester", I can't yell that too loud. As the Seagate tester *erased* the Cypress chip on my USE enclosure, causing me to have to track down a repair recipe. It's one reason I refrain from rushing to grab their Windows version of the tester. It can damage a certain enclosure chip. I didn't even know my enclosure used that chip, until it got erased :-( So for now, I'll have to wimp out and suggest HDTune as a test case. The paid version of HDTune, has write benchmarks, but obviously a write benchmark can wipe data (if not done properly). And this is why I don't normally send people off to find a write benchmarker, as I don't want any data loss stories. That's the nice thing about the HDTune free one, is it only does reads for drive testing, and that makes it *safe*. Paul |
#67
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
Hello Paul,
I haven't done anything since but I should have added that the external HD is a Seagate: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822178107 This is similar to mine: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Seagate-Back...em2c96e2 6ff1 Robert |
#68
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
I do have Sea Tools for Windows installed so maybe it can detect the external HD and run diagnostics? Robert |
#69
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
Mark Twain wrote:
I do have Sea Tools for Windows installed so maybe it can detect the external HD and run diagnostics? Robert By all means. Seatools is listed on the product page. http://www.seagate.com/ca/en/support...ls-win-master/ It's bus powered, and shouldn't really have a problem getting enough power. It would help if it had a power LED to monitor whether bus power is still available or not. It really has a minimalist interface. I have a device here, with a bright blue LED that tells me power is present. http://www.seagate.com/ca/en/support...s/backup-plus/ There is an Adobe Flash movie on setting the Power Management on the drive (on that web page). This really shouldn't be an issue, as the drive should "stay awake" when being written continuously. Have you tried to drag and drop a file onto the drive for copying ? Did that work ? The Adobe Dashboard software, I don't think it's supposed to interfere with the usage of the drive. You should still be able to use it like an ordinary drive. So give it the SeaTools treatment, and collect more info. Paul |
#70
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
I have tried to drag and drop a file
from the User Account but whenever I tried, the 'My Computer' screen disappeared. Unless there's another way of doing this? I connected the External HD to the 8200 and ran Sea Tools for Windows. It recognized the external drive but when I tried to put a tick in the box to do a long generic test it wouldn't tick but the HD would. Then, when I attempted to remove the external HD to give it another try, it said it was being used by another program. Just then the test status bar lit up with a short DST scan for the HD and a long generic scan which I is what I input. I guess it just took more time than I thought. This is what I see: Seagate - Sea Tools for Windows Basic Tests: * short drive self test * long drive self test * drive information * short generic * long generic * advanced test (if you click advanced test it gives you a warning pop-up that reads: Enable Advanced Features Warning: Advanced features can erase your data or make the drive unable for your system. Please read the help files or contact Seagate Technical Support before suing Advanced Features. Click 'I Accept' to enable Advanced Features. Click Cancel to go back to Basic Features). Detected Drives: Serial Number Model Number Firmware Revision Drive Status Test Status PATA/SATA 9RAOZ7H4 ST3160815A 3.AA short DST-Pass USB/1394 S2ZPJ9CD ST1000LM024HN- 2AR2 long generic It apparently passed both tests. Robert |
#71
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
Mark Twain wrote:
I have tried to drag and drop a file from the User Account but whenever I tried, the 'My Computer' screen disappeared. Unless there's another way of doing this? I connected the External HD to the 8200 and ran Sea Tools for Windows. It recognized the external drive but when I tried to put a tick in the box to do a long generic test it wouldn't tick but the HD would. Then, when I attempted to remove the external HD to give it another try, it said it was being used by another program. Just then the test status bar lit up with a short DST scan for the HD and a long generic scan which I is what I input. I guess it just took more time than I thought. This is what I see: Seagate - Sea Tools for Windows Basic Tests: * short drive self test * long drive self test * drive information * short generic * long generic * advanced test (if you click advanced test it gives you a warning pop-up that reads: Enable Advanced Features Warning: Advanced features can erase your data or make the drive unable for your system. Please read the help files or contact Seagate Technical Support before suing Advanced Features. Click 'I Accept' to enable Advanced Features. Click Cancel to go back to Basic Features). Detected Drives: Serial Number Model Number Firmware Revision Drive Status Test Status PATA/SATA 9RAOZ7H4 ST3160815A 3.AA short DST-Pass USB/1394 S2ZPJ9CD ST1000LM024HN- 2AR2 long generic It apparently passed both tests. Robert The test results are for two different drives, implying you tested the Seagate main drive inside the computer, as well as the external ST1000LM024HN. The long delay before the test came up, could be caused by the external drive "going to sleep". Use the Dashboard application that came with the 1TB drive, and extend the timeout period, then try again. There used to be some USB hard drives, where the drive would go to sleep, and the OS was unable to wake up the drive again (until you unplugged it and plugged it back in). Let's hope all those crappy designs are no longer in production. That happened, some time ago, and it really should not be happening now. Paul |
#72
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
I looked at the video but I don't have
Seagate Dashboard only Sea Tools. I suppose I could drag and drop a file from the C: drive since they are in the same pane to the external HD but would be leery of doing so. There is an indicator light on the external HD. I tried to do the other tests but they wouldn't run. Only the short and long generic which I'm running again to make sure. Could I not just copy a file to the external HD to test it? Like a Word document? Robert |
#73
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
I sent a Word document to the E drive and it
went OK and I was able to open it. While in there I found a Seagate Dashboard Installer and a Seagate Dash Board Installer.DMG I tried to open it via Firefox but it wouldn't. Robert |
#74
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
Mark Twain wrote:
I looked at the video but I don't have Seagate Dashboard only Sea Tools. I suppose I could drag and drop a file from the C: drive since they are in the same pane to the external HD but would be leery of doing so. There is an indicator light on the external HD. I tried to do the other tests but they wouldn't run. Only the short and long generic which I'm running again to make sure. Could I not just copy a file to the external HD to test it? Like a Word document? Robert It's possible only the short and long DST run, because the drive is not recognized by SeaTools. Perhaps a newer version of SeaTools is needed. When you install the Dashboard software, it does a couple of things. 1) Provides a software that does automatic backups. But would require leaving the external drive connected, so the software can access and store the backups. You have backup software already, so do not need this function. 2) The Dashboard software also has some control settings for the drive, including adjusting the "sleep timer". You can even set the drive to "Never". The flash video on the Seagate product page I showed you, demonstrates how to use it. Dashboard Installer EXE would be for Windows Dashboard Installer DMG would be for Macintosh How the DMG works, is it is a Disk Image which mounts like a file folder. And you can then look inside the file folder, for a software that runs immediately. That's how a Macintosh user would use the DMG offered. A Windows user cannot use the DMG file - it is only for Macintosh users. I run Firefox on my Mac G4, from a DMG file. The EXE on the drive, would presumably be for installing Dashboard for a Windows user, and then you can gain access to the sleep setting (power saving spindown option). Spindown is used on portable drives, because the drive has no cooling method, and the drive can get warm from being insulated in its tiny enclosure. Paul |
#75
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Unable to create a bootable rescue disk:
So sending the Word document isn't
verification that the external HD is working? However there are other folders/files on the drive so it must have worked at some point. When talking about Spindown and cooling. I have never removed the external HD from it's plastic sleeve it came with and leave it in the clear case. To use it; I open the end of the sleeve to insert the USB interface cable but now I'm thinking maybe it would be best to take the sleeve off to cool it? It seems from what you say, to move forward to test the external HD I would need a updated Seagate download for Sea Tools and the Dashboard. Can you point me to a download link or is this something I have to buy? Thanks, Robert |
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