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From: kony on 2 Apr 2008 02:37
On Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:40:07 GMT, Chip Thomas
<spamanot(a)gmail.net> wrote:

>dos-man wrote:
>> Well, my win 98 PC has crashed again. When I boot it just keeps
>> endlessly spinning the floppy drive. Tommorrow I have to bring the
>> monitor down from the attic and hook it up. Then I have to format the
>> C: drive and reinstall everything; all the drivers; all the software.
>> Yikes.
>>
>> My computer does have 2 hard drives in it, but they are different
>> models from different companies that hold different capacities. I'm
>> thinking it's about time that I bought 2 hard drives that are the
>> identical. Then when one goes down I can swap the drives and get back
>> to a reasonable starting point.
>>
>> The question I have is how is this done? Can it be done without
>> purchasing special drive-duplication software?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Dos-Man
>
>
>You could set up a RAID1 array which automatically mirrors the drives
>(but if you have a software problem on one it will also be on the other
>drive).
>
>Or you could use the Seagate drive mirroring utility Disk Wizard (free
>from Seagate site) and do periodic mirroring manually.

If both drives are kept online it won't necessarily protect
the mirror from malware or viri damage, better to have both
a mirror and an offline backup, but of course it'll require
an addt'l offline backup medium of some sort whether it be a
HDD or some other.
From: kony on 2 Apr 2008 02:39
On Tue, 1 Apr 2008 12:44:57 -0700 (PDT), conjobble(a)gmail.com
wrote:

<snip>

>> Thanks,
>> Dos-Man
>
>Question? What do you use the win98 system for? a server?
>You may pos consider updating to xp, virus protection and ghost.

Doesn't it seem a bit inappropriate to suggest XP to someone
named "Dos-Man"?
From: kony on 2 Apr 2008 02:48
On Sun, 30 Mar 2008 18:28:41 -0700 (PDT), dos-man
<ChairShot(a)mail.com> wrote:

>Well, my win 98 PC has crashed again. When I boot it just keeps
>endlessly spinning the floppy drive. Tommorrow I have to bring the
>monitor down from the attic and hook it up. Then I have to format the
>C: drive and reinstall everything; all the drivers; all the software.
>Yikes.

Let's back up for a moment and ignore what you wrote below
just for kicks. What caused this crash? Win98 does have
some remedies, including safe mode, a bootlog, scandisk,
reinstallation overtop of itself, as well as alternatives
for covering certain illware scenarios like software
creation of an antivirus scanning disk.

Suppose the crashing is from instability, perhaps the memory
and you have file corruption. Formatting the drive and
reinstalling is random and temporary in that case. Suppose
the drive is failing with bad sectors, is it a good
candidate to format and reinstall windows onto before at
least scanning with the HDD manufacturers utilities, if not
replacing the HDD with one (presumably) new(er) so there's a
reasonable expectation of some life ahead of it?

To recover from what you have described, even in worst case
where the cause is unknown (and otherwise the system can be
made stable and HDD is still functional), you don't need to
mirror to a 2nd HDD, you can use one of several backup
programs that create a HDD partition image, or for Win98 if
you have a 2nd system, even copying all the files and later
just copying them back.

>
>My computer does have 2 hard drives in it, but they are different
>models from different companies that hold different capacities. I'm
>thinking it's about time that I bought 2 hard drives that are the
>identical. Then when one goes down I can swap the drives and get back
>to a reasonable starting point.
>
>The question I have is how is this done? Can it be done without
>purchasing special drive-duplication software?

Keep in mind that some kinds of faults like memory errors or
a failing PSU or motherboard may equally interfere with both
drives' copies from working properly. Backing up the
OS/apps/data is always a good idea but finding the source of
the fault could be considered good prevention.
From: GT on 2 Apr 2008 06:25
"CBFalconer" <cbfalconer(a)yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:47F2A1C2.E7371152(a)yahoo.com...
> GT wrote:
>> "DaveW" <radiation(a)nuclear.org> wrote:
>>
>>> You either have to buy special backup software, or you can buy
>>> a PCI RAID card and set up a RAID 1 array. This results in all
>>> data and programs being simultaneously being written to both
>>> drives, resulting in a mirror image on the two drives. Either
>>> way, there is no good FREE way to do what you want to do.
>>
>> What is this post related to? This does not follow up any other
>> post and you have not included any text from the original?
>
> I suspect you have a faulty reader that deletes all sigs from your
> reading material. DaveW did the basic sin of top-posting, and his
> original did quote. However the quote followed his sig, so your
> reader deleted it all.

No - reader is fine - I manually delete everything after a "dash, dash,
space". I have jumped on the anti top-post bandwaggon!


From: powersupplycables on 3 Apr 2008 16:18
On Mar 30, 9:28 pm, dos-man <ChairS...(a)mail.com> wrote:
> Well, my win 98 PC has crashed again. When I boot it just keeps
> endlessly spinning the floppy drive. Tommorrow I have to bring the
> monitor down from the attic and hook it up. Then I have to format the
You can use a HD splitter cable.
Check this one:
http://www.powersupplycables.com/shopping/pgm-more_information.php?id=29&=SID

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