OT:Data recovery

The CMOS off-line drive was the backup for the C drive on which XP was being installed.

I had performed an FDISK repartitioning of the C drive, and XP simply decided to format all the drives on the system, whether or not they were enabled as being on-line by the CMOS settings.

And no, Microsoft XP installation instructions made no mention of this possibility.

Evidently the only safe way to have XP keep its hands off of your backup drive is to physically disconnect it from the system!

XP is way ahead of Win95 and Win98, both of which I hated! I love XP, wouldn't think of going back.

Lane

How, from bits and fragments that were later found on various floppies and CD-roms.

I probably managed to salvage 20%, and lost 80% of my programs and data.

The ironic part of this story is that I had spent the money to install a second, bootable hard drive on the system with no other purpose than to provide a bootable backup mechanism in the event that the primary C-drive failed, and the only time that the backup drive was ever on-line concurrently with the C-drive was during bi-weekly backups. I believed that I was well protected, but that was before XP.

More ironic still is that fact that the only justification that I had for installing Windows XP was to drive a network card that I had recently installed to interface with cable Internet! Before that time, I was running Windows 95, which except for the network capability, did everything that I needed. Only after the disaster did I learn that there is a service pack for Win95 that provides this network capability.

As a consequence, I lost roughly 80% of my C language source files, all of my GW-Basic source files, all of my Pagemaker documents, all of my spread-sheet files, and all of my MS-Word documents. All in all, more than 7 years worth of accumulated data.

To make matters worse, Pagemaker won't even run under Windows XP, and that's a $400 bit of software. Small change.

All in all, I'd have to say that the installation of Windows XP cost me more than $25,000 in lost work because of Microsoft's negligence. How to I arrive at this figure you ask? To cite examples: The loss of all my source files for the software contained in the OIDT, the Tomahawk launch console on Navy surface ships, plus that for the ILS control system that Raytheon sold to the FAA. Of course both of these agencies have backup copies, except for the fact that they are not current. Then of course there is the software source for the Fenwal Bleed Air leak detection system that is used on most of the world's military and civilian jet aircraft. Probably, $25,000 is a too conservative estimate of the total loss, because it would take me several years to duplicate it, so maybe $250,000 is closer to what XP actually cost me in lost software consulting income.

Realize that to be in the software consulting business, to earn the big bucks you have to provide immediate results. When either the military or the commercial customers discover a bug in their systems, they want it resolved in days, not weeks or months. Without the latest deployed version of the system software which you developed immediately available, you may as well take down your shingle and go out of the business.

I simply post this as a word to the wise, and have now installed a DVD on the computer to allow me to totally capture the entire contents of my C-drive on a bi-weekly backup schedule. Still, since the DVD disks are not directly bootable, I will still lose at least a days work if and when the primary C-drive fails. To counter this possibility, I'm in the process of ordering a removable backup drive, that I can physically remove from the machine -- something that I should have done prior to installing XP!

My other alternative is to install a RAID storage system, where the data is sriped over a number of hard drives, typically 5, and the loss of any one is 100% recoverable. Even XP can't damage that.

Harry C.

I installed XP Pro mostly because it supported network capabilities and would drive a newly added USB interface.

Otherwise, WIN95 worked much better and was faster.

Harry C.

Have you looked at SpinRite?

Cost is $89.

I have no experience with SpinRite, but I've used Gibson's security tools for years.

-Ron

On 9 Apr 2005 10:08:02 -0700, "Jim" wrote something ......and in reply I say!:

OK. You may well be right.Someone else mentioned simply "reinstlling XP". I thought "Ho no!" and left it.

When you say "boot with the CD in" you mean the XP CD?

****************************************************************************************** WHY _ARE_ WE HERE?

Nick White --- HEAD:Hertz Music

remove ns from my header address to reply via email

!!

On Sat, 09 Apr 2005 17:01:31 GMT, Ted Edwards wrote something ......and in reply I say!:

Because there is less software available for the others. Many software cos back away from Linux etc. Also, when you buy a PC, you GET XP! and that's it.

I can remember many people saying that XP was "the answer" to the woes of W2000, Millenium etc....

****************************************************************************************** WHY _ARE_ WE HERE?

Nick White --- HEAD:Hertz Music

remove ns from my header address to reply via email

!!

My outfit has about 25-30,000 IBM laptops with XP on them. I've had problems with the IBM, mainly hard drives, but not particularly with XP. It's also on two home machines, and soon another. Works fine. I also have four workstations and a server at work running 2000 (was process control software compatibility issues). Fluky sob to get installed trouble free.

Pete Keillor

******************************************************************************************

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in news:1113085234.805517.39760 @f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:

Unless you were attempting to use it as a Domain Controller, XP Home would have sufficed.

IMO, M$ has had a checkered history with their DOS-based OSes:

DOS 1 was fair DOS 2 had issues DOS 3 was fair DOS 4 was a dog DOS 5 was fair DOS 6/6.1 had issues DOS 6.2 was good

95 Upgrade was bad 95 OSR2 [the OEM version] was good 98 Upgrade/"First Edition" was bad 98 Second Edition was good ME ["Maximum Exasperation"] was horrible

Their NT ["New Technology"] OSes have been far better: NT Workstation [a subset of their server offering], 2000, and XP have all been solid performers for me.

FWIW, XP Home is the OS that Bill Gates alluded to in his presentation of

95 when he stated that 95 was to be the last DOS-based M$ OS and that the next one would be based on NT.

It only took them 6 extra years to accomplish it than Gates had publicly promised. [It was supposed to come out in '97.]

[ ... ]

[ ... ]

Ouch!

I agree.

Don't bet on it! What is to keep XP from deciding to re-format the entire RAID array? Perhaps even thinking of it as simply yet another IDE drive.

Have you checked what happens with a SCSI drive attached to the system while you install XP? No bets on whether it would skip those drives, too.

I don't have nearly as much hanging on my files, and I not only back up to 8mm tapes regularly, but put project-related stuff to DVDs or CD-ROMs (depending on size), and duplicate things between multiple systems via the net.

And Sun's Solaris (or any other unix which I have installed) is very nice about asking which drives you are willing to allow it to touch during an install. I've just gone through an installation of Solaris 10 (now available for free as a (very large) download from Sun) on several systems -- two new to me with only disks which were totally available, and two which had other disks hung on them -- some on the primary SCSI interface, and some on a secondary one. In both cases, it saw all of the drives, and politely asked me which it was supposed to use for the install. (And by default, only selected the lowest SCSI ID available, marking the others as "potentially available" until I made my own selections.

(Granted, I did a "custom" install, so I could partition the disks according to what I expected the use to be, not just going on the default install sizes.) The closest thing to a potential problem was that it presented the disks sorted alphabetically, so the following drives all came before /dev/dsk/c0t1d0:

/dev/dsk/c0t11d0, /dev/dsk/c0t12d0, /dev/dsk/c0t13d0, /dev/dsk/c0t14d0, and /dev/dsk/c0t15d0.

(In case you care, the format of those names is:

c? Controller -- 0 for the built in one, 1..6 for the ones potentially plugged into sBus slots.

t? Target number -- the SCSI-ID of the drive

d? lun (Logical Unit Number) -- when more than one device shares the same SCSI ID. Originally, it was when two or more ST-506 or ESDI drives shared a single card which adapted them to SCSI interface. Now, it is for things such as a SCSI-interfaced PCMCIA card reader, or a tape "robot" or "jukebox", which uses one LUN (usually 0) to talk to the tape drive itself, and a second (usually 1) to talk to the "robot" which changes tapes.

And -- finally (not mentioned before, because I was specifying drives, not partitions:

s? Slice (partition) number. Under Solaris, there are eight slices, from 0 through 7, of which slice 2 is the whole disk.

OpenBSD (and probably other modern BSDs) instead of using slices, use letters, and while the old BSDs (such as older SunOs) also had 8 partitions, with 'c' being the whole disk, modern ones have 15 partitions, still with 'c' (2) being the whole disk.

P.S. Solaris also asked whether any of the existing partitions on the disks onto which I was installing it contained data which should not be deleted. Don't you wish that XP had been so nice?

Good Luck, DoN.

Or better yet, un-install XP. ;-)

You ask, "Why are we here?" Answer: "Because there's beer!":-)

Ted

Can you run XP with FAT32 (assuming you still want to)? I know you can run W2000 pro with FAT32. It is possible to create an OS/2-eCS bootable CD (DVD is being worked on) that can create a RAM disk and load all the necessary software for backup/restore into the RAM disk. Once booted, you can remove the bootable and mount your backups.

My interest in this method arises from having a laptop with only one CD/DVD drive.

Ted

Much has changed over the years. You might want to look at eCS

is OS/2 now undergoing active development again. There is still some stuff you can't get which is why I occasionally fire up W2000 but that is getting less and less frequent. :-) YMMV

Ted

This is rather odd..as Ive done multiple installs with both versions of XP, pre and post SP1/2 and Ive never seen this issue arise.

Not with any sort of hardware.

Gunner

Leftwingers are like pond scum. They are green, slimy, show up where they are not wanted, and interfere with the fishing.

Strider

I use both XP Pro, and 2000 pro. Xp pro is very stable on a decent machine, and is capable of running just about any software you can feed it, from games to Cad.

2000 pro has less available drivers for hardware and will choke some programs.

Shrug. I like em both. The server has 2000 Pro Server, the computer Im typing this on runs XP pro, with an uptime of about 2 years so far.

Gunner

Leftwingers are like pond scum. They are green, slimy, show up where they are not wanted, and interfere with the fishing.

Strider

I'll second this. We just installed XP with no problems at all, let alone on the second disk drive.

Steve

Gunner wrote:

Yes. If one installs a multi-boot system and wants a Win98 OS to be able to read all drives then you should install XP with Fat32. I have a computer with Win98, Win2000Pro, & Win XP Pro installed on Fat 32 partitions. If you do this it is easiest to partition the HD so each OS has its own partition. Install oldest OS first and XP last. You can install Win98 after XP is installed but it is a bit more complicated.

We did this in a computer repair class and the instructor confiscated all manuals and all installation CDs. He said "Fellows (there were three girls in the class) you don't always get the manuals and CDs when a computer comes in for repair. Get what you need from the internet."

I don't recall seeing a single driver for OS2.

The computer (above) has one CD drive.

Old Nick, yes, the XP install cd. You don't want to reinstall, though. Just go to Repair & then the command prompt. There, type fdisk It should run. If it doesn't, you may have to change directories to where it is stored. Should be on the CD, but I don't know off hand. Once in Fdisk, just find the first partition & set it to active. I think that's option 2, but again, I'm not positive off hand.

Setting a partition to active is completely non-destructive. Reinstalling Windows will put in a new registry,so your programs & all their data will be there, but anything that needs a registry setting to run (most) won't work until you reinstall. There are ways to salvage this, too, but they're pretty advanced & can be a pain even when they work. Personally, I've reinstalled & don't bother to try to salvage the registry. It's an opportunity to clean up some.

Jim

Jim