{"id":136,"date":"2009-03-19T21:44:38","date_gmt":"2009-03-20T03:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?p=136"},"modified":"2010-09-19T09:46:14","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T15:46:14","slug":"whos-gonna-drive-your-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/whos-gonna-drive-your-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Who’s gonna ‘drive your home?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just before Christmas my eldest managed to frag the hard drive on his laptop.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not sure how he managed it (probably deliberately, to get out of doing his homework), but when you tried booting it up you’d just get an “Operating System not found” message.\u00c2\u00a0 Freya has an identical laptop (to avoid sibling rivalry) so I swapped her drive into Finn’s laptop and confirmed that everything else was fine – just a blank hard drive.\u00c2\u00a0It could<\/em> have been that he’d just deleted everything, but that’s pretty hard to do by accident, so I’m guessing he dropped\u00c2\u00a0the laptop and crashed the drive.\u00c2\u00a0 Rather than risk re-installing to a potentially damaged drive, I thought I’d better get a new one.<\/p>\n

I called up Dell<\/strong> to\u00c2\u00a0find out that – of course! – the laptop was out of warranty by a couple of weeks, but Dell said that they could sell me a replacement drive for $70 anyway. (Which makes\u00c2\u00a0me think that maybe Dell<\/em> sabotaged it to so that would break just out of warranty and I’d buy a new one…)\u00c2\u00a0 The replacement drive took longer to arrive than the original laptop for some reason, so by the time it turned up I was off traveling.<\/p>\n

When I finally got back home some 6 weeks later and got round to installing the new drive, I\u00c2\u00a0discovered that it was completely blank.\u00c2\u00a0 (That same old “Operating System not found” message – ho hum.)\u00c2\u00a0 WTF\u00e2\u20ac\u00bd<\/span> I had assumed that Dell would at least load the drive with all of the OEM stuff\u00c2\u00a0that the laptop\u00c2\u00a0comes with off the conveyor belt.\u00c2\u00a0 Otherwise, why did they insist on selling a replacement for a specific laptop model and not just a replacement of that specific part number??\u00c2\u00a0 And why did it take longer than buying a whole new laptop that they’d have to ‘build’ (and<\/em> load all of the OEM software onto…), when they didn’t do anything more take it out of the part supplier’s box and put it in one of their own? Gee, thanks for the great Customer Service, Michael…<\/p>\n

Anyway, I decided that re-installing the OS and everything else by hand was just too much like hard work, and that’s when I got the greatest idea in the history of the world (sorry, I’m reading the My Wacky School<\/em> books with Freya at the moment…). I figured I could just just image\u00c2\u00a0Freya’s\u00c2\u00a0drive\u00c2\u00a0onto Finn’s new one.\u00c2\u00a0 Windows Vista<\/strong> comes with some utilities for taking ‘complete backups’ but these miss off all of the system files, and insist that you have the OS installed already (which you won’t if you really need it), so that was useless.\u00c2\u00a0 So I\u00c2\u00a0ended up getting\u00c2\u00a0a copy of Norton Ghost<\/strong>, which will at least do a bit-for-bit copy of the entire drive.\u00c2\u00a0 I installed Ghost, backed up Freya’s\u00c2\u00a0laptop to a USB-attached 500GB external drive (it wanted a couple of dozen CDs…), then attached that to Finn’s PC, booted from the Recovery Disk, and restored Freya’s drive to Finn’s laptop.\u00c2\u00a0 It took a bit of fiddling around as Ghost seemed to create several files (I was expecting one), but eventually I could boot up and log on again – albeit with a lovely pink theme, and access to all of Freya’s email.\u00c2\u00a0 So I deleted Freya’s\u00c2\u00a0user and created a new one for Finn, and he was back up and running. Although, of course, he’d lost a year’s worth of files.\u00c2\u00a0 Which admittedly isn’t much, given that all he does on it is watch videos on YouTube, and play games on MiniClips. (I could lie and say that all of his thankyou letters from Christmas were on his PC and that’s why you didn’t get one, but sharp readers will recall that the PC broke before<\/em> Christmas…)<\/p>\n

I’ve now got him using Google Docs for his homework, so at least he won’t\u00c2\u00a0lose anything else, but this whole (three month) debacle did get me thinking a bit more seriously about backups (which are extremely ad-hoc – if at all – at present).\u00c2\u00a0 Norton Ghost does provide a pretty robust backup tool, so I quickly installed that on all four PCs in the house (the license said nothing about an installation limit…).\u00c2\u00a0 But then I’ve still got to swap the external hard drive between the PCs and manually take backups when the PCs aren’t in use, which is a pain (and the main reason why backups are currently only taken periodically (like once a year…) at the moment.<\/p>\n

And that’s when I got the greatest idea in the history of the world.\u00c2\u00a0 I bought a Western Digital<\/strong> LAN drive.\u00c2\u00a0 This is basically another external hard drive, but it plugs directly into the network (via a standard CAT5 cable) instead of into an individual PC (via the USB port).\u00c2\u00a0 So I plugged this into my Linksys<\/strong> wireless router, fiddled with a few settings in Windows (the software supplied with the LAN drive didn’t detect the new drive, but Vista found it straight away, and Windows XP<\/strong> just needed to be told to look for it), and voila!<\/em> I can now access it wirelessly, from every PC in the house.\u00c2\u00a0 I then set up Norton Ghost to automatically back up every-one’s PCs once a week (and mine once a\u00c2\u00a0day), and my work was done!.\u00c2\u00a0 Man, I’m so<\/em> SysAdmin! All I need now is a pager I never answer, and a deep(er) disdain for the technologically-challenged!<\/p>\n

As an added bonus, the 1 Terabyte LAN drive comes with a USB port, so I plugged my existing 500GB external drive into it, giving me total network storage of 1,500,000 meg (or one-and-a-half billion times the size of the memory of my first computer, a Sinclair ZX81<\/strong>).\u00c2\u00a0 So I’ve now got the backups running onto it, have all of our digital photos and other assorted ‘shared assets’ on it, and as soon as I can find some multi-region video ripping software, I’ll rip all of my Simpsons DVDs to it so that I can watch them all, on demand, on my 50″ flat-panel TV, via the PlayStation<\/strong>, which is also wirelessly connected to the same network.\u00c2\u00a0 Genius!<\/p>\n

And as an added, added bonus, because this new drive is attached to my (secure) home network, which is attached to the Internet, I can access it from anywhere in the World, via\u00c2\u00a0a password-protected\u00c2\u00a0Website (courtesy of a service called MioNet<\/strong> that Western Digital provides free with the purchase of its LAN drives). So if I’m away on business for weeks at a time again, I can go and look at those digital photos and remind myself of what the kids look like.\u00c2\u00a0 Or stream the Simpsons to my laptop so I’m not forced to endure Japanese TV again.<\/p>\n

Of course, the downside to all this technology is that if Finn manages to frag the network<\/em> drive, we’re now\u00c2\u00a0all<\/em> hosed… Maybe it’s time to invest in\u00c2\u00a0my own server farm.<\/p>\n

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Just before Christmas my eldest managed to frag the hard drive on his laptop.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not sure how he managed it (probably deliberately, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,6],"tags":[25,28,23],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-life","tag-pc","tag-playstation-3","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}