[Leica] Computer help!!!

[s.dimitrov at charter.net (Slobodan Dimitrov)]

Is there a Mac in your future?


Slobodan Dimitrov
Studio G-8, AGCC
http://sdimitrovphoto.com



On Aug 20, 2005, at 5:55 PM, Tina Manley wrote:

> Dear LUG:
>
> I am depending on you, especially Brian, to save my sanity.  My  
> computer has crashed once again.  I have in my closet 6 Maxtor 250  
> GB hard drives that have failed.  Dell keeps replacing them and  
> they are all under warranty which is great, but I have weeks worth  
> of work invested in each one.  I have backed them up religiously  
> with Retrospect and, when that failed, with Norton Ghost.  The back- 
> up files were stored in Lacie external hard drives - one of 120 GB  
> and the other 400 GB (which I have since discovered are only  
> Maxtors in a pretty case!!).  They would not show up in any search  
> at first but now show up under Norton with no files at all.  Dell  
> finally replaced the motherboard with the last failure and I  
> thought everything would be o.k.  One week ago, after returning  
> from the Middle Ease, I got the blue screen of death.  Nothing  
> would work.  The disk diagnostic test says that the disks pass but  
> Windows won't load.  Dell says that it is a software problem and  
> sent out a Service Pack 2 for Windows XP.  The only problem is that  
> you have to reformat the hard drives and lose everything to install  
> it!!!  I had weeks' worth of work on two 250 GB hard drives so I  
> took those out of the computer and installed new Western Digital  
> hard drives (which I bought!!) to install the new Windows XP,  
> SP2.   I've been working on this for a week.  The new installation  
> will not recognize my internet connections so I am working on my  
> laptop.  I've ordered some external hard drive cases to hook my old  
> SATA hard drives up through the USB port and will hopefully be able  
> recover everything on my old hard drives.  If not, you will hear me  
> scream.
>
> What I want to know is how to avoid these problems in the future.   
> I've read about RAID systems, but I have no idea what they are or  
> whether they would help.  Is there a tutorial about RAID?   I will  
> have internal hard drives of 300GB and 250GB (both Western  
> Digital)  and external hard drives of 120GB and 400GB (Lacie) and  
> 300GB Western Digital.   In the closet I have 6 250GB Maxtor hard  
> drives that fail the diagnostic test.  I've backed all of my  
> digital files up on DVDs so I haven't lost those, but slide shows  
> and videos that I've worked weeks on have possibly disappeared.   
> I'm tired of spending all of my time on computers instead of  
> photography.  Right now I have a rescue program trying to recover  
> the tiff files on one of the corrupt hard drives.  It has 1560  
> minutes to go.
>
> AARRGHHH!!  I am retiring before I pull all of my hair out.  Can  
> anybody offer any solutions?
>
> Leically,
>
> Tina
>
>
>
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