Total Disaster!! PLEASE HELP!!

[pinbrook]

what did we all do in the days before extrnal hard drives?

[TraceyHand]

what did we all do in the days before extrnal hard drives?

created a lot of coasters!

[wjcampbe]

Karen,

I still think you need to address the internal hard drive situation here. It is not likely that your PC would be happy booting from an external drive, so the only thing the external drive will do for you, is give you a copy of your data when you eventually get back up and running after the crash that last week's occurrances guarantee is coming.

Internal hard drives are cheap, and there must be someone in your area that knows how to open the case, slide the HD into place, connect the power and either the spare connector on the existing data cable, or the secondary IDE cable and close the case again.

[pinbrook]

Yes i agree with Bill, you really should have an internal HD.

Due to the nature of an external HD being portable is is less reliable than having an internal HD.

Connecting an internal HD isn't to diffcult, just pull out the current one and put the new one in using exactly the same cables etc

It may seem scarey but its just like lego

[NormanRouxel]

Karen,

Getting that external drive is only part of the solution. The real solution is, as Bill and I have said, to replace the drive that just caused you so much trouble. Faulty drives don't heal, they invariably get worse, or fail completely. Relying on daily snapshots or backups is risky if they crash because of incipient hardware errors.

You've got to cost the lost time and missing data that the next failure will cost you.

Now compare that with the sub £100 that it should cost to take your computer to a local store and ask them if it's possible to clone your existing system onto a newly installed hard drive.

If that's too much work, or too tricky, you can buy a complete system unit with XP Home installed for a measly £170 (e.g. from www.ebuyer.com).

A new hard disk (or complete system) with the external disk connected and used as the Snapshot and Database Backup drive will give you most of the robustness needed to host mission critical data safely.

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

For the others asking about how some of us backup in general, I've always expected my disk drives to fail and treated my data as if that was going to happen right now. In the early 486 days (long before USB or CD-writers) I used SCSI tape drives (my first held just 500Mb). When disks got bigger than would comfortably store on tape I used RAID Mirrored drives. I recall a 30Gb IBM drive I had with similar problems to Karens. Sure enough it died unexpectedly, but as it was mirrrored its twin simply carried on until it got a new sibling.

Nowadays I use a mixture of occassional Norton Ghost images onto a USB Disk, together with PowerQuest Datakeeper software that continuously monitors my work folders and writes any changed data to a Snap server sitting in a faraway room. Datakeeper automatically backs up files about 6 seconds after they've changed and maintains the last 5 prior copies, so I can even recover work after I've damaged it through several erronous edits.

The result of this is that I've never lost any data - I just did a quick scan of my current system and still have readable files and working programs going all the way back to the DOS 3 era of 1988. Anyone recall this

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.
Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and
down a gully. In the distance there is a tall gleaming white tower.

Yes. the DOS version of Adventure and it still runs in a Command Prompt in XP-Pro! I'm off to scare that snake by freeing the cheerful bird from the wicker cage (but I have to remember that the bird is scared of the rod, so I have to drop that first)....

[KarenBM]

Yes I agree that I should have a secondary internal "slave" drive. Anyone know of someone reliable in South London that could both fit the drive and format it etc? I guess I could do it myself but it's far too important to mess up as I need all data from the existing drive onto the new drive also. So if anyone know of someone RELIABLE and competent I would be grateful. Please PM me with details.

Thanks also for all your suggestions on back-ups.

Karen

[KarenBM]

Further to this I have to say that you should be careful careful when advising people that they need a new HD when a problem occurs. I have a new HD and the problem still exists - thus nothing to do with disk failure. The problem clearly lies somewhere in the Actinic installation. I frequently get freezes when I try to carry out some task in Actinic, plus it now has a new problem in that each time I download an order I get a "Record deleted" message.

[NormanRouxel]

Your post #1 said

I/O error with one of the graphics. OK, so I closed the software down and tried opening again - no go. It stated there were bad sectors and would I like to reformat the disk. I then checked and repaied files with Windows repair system. Windows stated that it had replaced bad clusters in various Actinic related sectors - including Actinic~1.log, Candprod.fil and actinic~1.mdb.

This clearly indicated a hardware failure in your hard disk. Actinic cannot cause I/O errors or bad sectors. These are hardware failure characteristics.

I was speaking with the credentials of a degree in computer science / computer engineering and 30 years hardware design experience.

It look like you chose to ignore all skilled advice given and limp on with a suspect system.

As I (rightly) said "Faulty drives don't heal, they invariably get worse" and it looks like you're suffering from that, or a completely new, unrelated problem.

[wjcampbe]

Karen,

I think I was first to say get a new hard drive, and given the same reported symptoms again, my advice would be the same again.

The symptoms you reported were consistent with an imminent hard drive failure and demanded immediate action. The fact that you now have new problems does not in any way indicate that the old hard drive was not on its way out.

What anti-virus and anti-spyware products do you use, what firewall programme do you use and what periodic maintenance do you run on your PC(s)?

How often do your run Windows (or Microsoft if you also have other products) Update?

Is the "Record Deleted" error message coming from within Actinic? Come to that, what version of Actinic are you running?

[KarenBM]

It look like you chose to ignore all skilled advice given and limp on with a suspect system.
.

Erm no, I have a new hard drive; please see previous post.

[pinbrook]

I have a new HD and the problem still exists

Are you saying you stil have I/O problems? if these problems have gone away then the disk problem has been resolved with the replacement disk.

I frequently get freezes when I try to carry out some task in Actinic, plus it now has a new problem in that each time I download an order I get a "Record deleted" message.

this is software related and has nothing to do with the hardware failure identified by Norman and Bill

[KarenBM]

Your post #1 said This clearly indicated a hardware failure in your hard disk. Actinic cannot cause I/O errors or bad sectors. These are hardware failure characteristics.

I was speaking with the credentials of a degree in computer science / computer engineering and 30 years hardware design experience.

It look like you chose to ignore all skilled advice given and limp on with a suspect system.

As I (rightly) said "Faulty drives don't heal, they invariably get worse" and it looks like you're suffering from that, or a completely new, unrelated problem.

Is it not feasible that the constant crashes from Actinic could produce bad sectors on the disk? Actually I have a degree in IT and Computing (believe it or not!!!)

[KarenBM]

Are you saying you stil have I/O problems? if these problems have gone away then the disk problem has been resolved with the replacement disk.

Those problems never reoccured. The old HD never showed any signs of failure. It is still going now as a slave drive.

this is software related and has nothing to do with the hardware failure identified by Norman and Bill

Yes I know.

[cover_974]

Backups

Hi Karen
We don't keep stock on Actinic and we export all orders to our internal systems but we still snapshot our 750 page site once a week and then network copy the snapshot to a second P/C. We run the "apache demo" system on that P/c on the LAN. My telephone staff use that to view as it runs fast when talking with customers.

Only 2 company PCs have internet facilities (One for Actinic uploads and the other for Actinic downloads (both do other internet functions)) so they cannot see the real site on their P/Cs, paranoid Fortress security stuff, but our corporate data bases are reasonably safe from prying hackers and are backed up daily.

There's a backup idea that ensures that the backup is tested and has practical and useful results. Won't Help you now but the future could be brighter!

Michael at Willowfabrics.com

[wjcampbe]

Is it not feasible that the constant crashes from Actinic could produce bad sectors on the disk?

Not in any way that I can imagine.

A bad sector is an area where the magnetic coating is no longer capable of doing its job [retaining data] - i.e. a physical condition.

A software crash is a programme state where the next logical instruction cannot be performed or the returned value is of the wrong type/magnitude and processing cannot continue - now this CAN be caused by a bad disk sector not returning the value originally set.