Clan {DOU}

So oddly enough of the 3 drives in my machine, the 8 year+ old IDE drives still work but last week the newest SATA 500gb died. Will not even spin unless I slap it around a bit. Which sucks as it came with my last build and was my main drive with my OS and lots of other shit, including UT and everything business related too. At least my music is on the other 2. I had been having random freezing but assumed it was from the one old IDE drive that is slightly noisy. So I had a fun few days of screwing around trying to get the computer to run on the old install of XP on the IDE drive that had no drivers for the current computer. Finally got it going to where the lan and sound and video will work. Sucks though, I was used to a lot of the shit in SP3, no urge to go to 7 really after seeing it. Also of course I can't remember how exactly a lot of things were set, but nothing looks right to me now... Dammit.

So again a reminder, back up important shit! I had some of mine stored multiple places but not all the things I ought to.

I never used to back up my "Stuff". I'm notoriously forgetful about it.

I got something that made it easy to do. It's a program called Accronis. Norton has one very similar to it called Ghost. It can be preset to take a snapshot of your drives your desktop, your music and photos, everything just the way you have it set up, at intervals of your choosing. I back up to an external drive twice a week in the late evening. It's scheduled so I don't need to remember and it overwrites the oldest saved file.

Nothings perfect but for me this is as close to perfect as it gets.

mAmA

hey i have a better system to run UT on but the hard drive fried on it....could i simply replace that drive with the one on here or would i have to like reformat and all that stuff?

If you have a working drive from an older machine it's worth a try to stick it in the newer one and see what happens. You may have to give it driver cds to install a bunch of stuff when it starts up, or if it manages to work enough to get on the internet go download new drivers. I have had decent luck running several old installs of windows to try and get stuff running again.

If it doesn't act like it wants to boot up you may have to get a dos prompt using recovery console or something and type bootcfg /rebuild so it makes a new boot.ini and realizes what drive to run off of.

In related news, the old noisy HD also died, so it seems likely it was causing my freezing and me kicking the computer in anger is likely what killed the newer drive... I ordered 2 new HDs, one just like my old 500 that died and the newer version of it. I thought I would be able to swap discs inside and maybe recover my stuff that way. Unfortunatly either they thought they were doing me a favor or they just ran out because they shipped me just the newer version of the drive. I thought perhaps they were close enough and took one apart and the old dead one. Turns out between that one letter change on the end of the number they went from a 2 disc HD to a single. So shit...

Yup, hard drives are not what they used to be, I trashed two Seagate 500 gig drives in one year, I will never buy Seagate again, from new I could not play UT3, turns out it was the brand new hard drives, since installing WD 1TB drive, no problems.
I would like to get another WD hard drive but the price doubled for the same drive in the 5 months since I bought it. seems there is a shortage of drives and the price went through the roof.

Grubb