backing up a Windoz system.

[dave at microway.com (David Backeberg)]

On Sunday 18 July 2004 09:45, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Another interesting issue cropped up with my wife's system. It appears
> to be running more slowly although I have verified that is is not
> infected, but Norton Disk Dr. keeps restarting even after I have deleted
> virtually everything from the task manager. Scandisk runs fine through
> its normal checks, but when going the surface test, it restarts. I would
> run partition Magic on it, but for some reason, it will not boot the
> floppy before the HD regardless of what I set in the BIOS, but It does
> boot a Linux CD (about half the time). I don't have an aversion to
> reinstalling ME, except that reinstalling all my wife's applications is
> a real pain. (BTW: the system does not need defragging).

I agree with the assessment about Windows "just doing that" after x number of 
months. Seems to take longer with XP / 2000 than with 98... Somewhere I'd 
been told that this was because of the windoze idea of the registry, and that 
searching a multi megabyte text file takes linear time, which gets worse and 
worse as the file grows. (As Windows throws every silly little setting, like 
whether or not you want your whole File menu to appear in Word, into one huge 
file). Can't vouch for the truth of that claim, nor where I saw it.

And what were you trying to find with Norton disk doctor? You could boot a 
Knoppix cd and run smartmontools to check the physical disk. There was a nice 
write-up in the January 2004 Linux Journal about how to use smartmontools. 
You could also run a non-destructive read-write test with badblocks while you 
were booted into Knoppix.

Are you running FAT with ME? Some people (everybody I've asked) think NTFS 
works better, but that might require 2000. Not sure.
-- 
David Backeberg (dave at microway.com)
Microway Technical Support - http://www.microway.com

(508) 732-5542 Direct
(508) 746-7341 Main
(508) 746-4678 Fax