h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've got to look for some drivers for the modem, it's on 3 and is 100 times faster at the moment, openSUSE took one hour to download.

I haven't heard anything about the HDD I bought.

I hate it when things stop working; actually you are better of with a basic green display from the eighties, no, better still card format and watch tv on the telly.

Good thinking.

I now know what happens when kasperski finds a worm without a known signature; it doesn't ask first and rips out the application with the infection. a p2p worm found in drive imaging software.

I'm keeping my eye on conficker, the new variant is thought to be out there and experts think it was developed for mac ox.

I got GParted running, in fact I could partition now because most of my system is backed up on 5 dvd's, and I've got BARTpe a dodgy op system that runs on a cd.

I stuck a usb flash in but it didn't see it, does it only see one drive at a time.

Every time I run a live cd I have to re-install nvidia drivers, except gparted which doesn't change a thing.

BartPE is crap, it say's my windows is OEM but I paid £118 for it in 2004 and it is validated by M$; further in making a live cd it assumes more than one dvd drive or windows copied somewhere

Copying copyrighted stuff is impossible on my pc.

So I'm going to mount install Suse on the external and use your disk imager to copy.

I still don't understand if I should call the ext drive logical or primary or extended. I think primary means number 1 loading volume and windows always has to be in the primary partition, so how can somebody install different versions of windows unless all partitions are called primary?

What should I call a partition or ext drive; logical extended or primary?

I've got more than one drive soon, and I'm going to partition both.

"I still don't understand if I should call the ext drive logical or primary or extended."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning

Yes but which one should I use.

g4l-v0.29.devel.tar cannot be uncompressed in windows and appears to be a live image.

Has KDE4 got something to image partitions, I don't want to mess about and only want to have to plug the external in and hit restore.

Will bios see partitions in an external drive because I could set the first partition to data and second to that image thingy.

OK they are all primary max 4, logical is only a drive letter allocation to an extended partition.

If I press f8 during asus logo I get a choice of drives to boot from; this sort of conflicts with safe mode.

I don't know yet if bios will see partitions and if I have to take a risk with a bootloader.

The file system? Not fat32 since I need to save >4 Gb files.

Get error 'cycle error' at the same point on two different disc imagers, around the 60 gigabyte point.

Don't know what it means.

"g4l-v0.29.devel.tar cannot be uncompressed in windows and appears to be a live image."

No, and no. The "devel" means it's a development (unstable) release, so you *don't* wwant to install it, and all images end in ".ISO" - ".TAR" is a TAR archive, I would guess intended to be extracted on top of an existing, working image. Don't do it.

Looks like the disc is already US; how do you fix this:

http://downloads.arismetique.com/HardDrive.png

Two duff sectors are nothing to worry about - as it says, the next time you need to write to them they will be remapped. This would have happened anyway even if you had never run any disk utilities - modern drives have a whole spare cylinder on every platter specifically for this sort of remapping operation.

SMART's detects physical(as opposed to software) problems with hard-drives, it's job is give you you enough warning that you have time to make back ups before total failure of the drive. Given that the two warnings shown were because the error rate was BELOW average I'm not actually sure you have a problem.

Actually, my experience of SMART is that it suddenly renders your drive inaccessible to "prevent you from further corrupting your data", which forces you to return it to a "data recovery centre" and pay an arm and a leg to get your data back, while if SMART hadn't been enabled you'd just have needed to copy it all onto a good drive. It's a job creation scheme for data recovery technicians.

How do I disable smart?

Seagate have got a DOS tool for repairing bad sectors; it doesn't say if it removes data, since these bad sectors are not going to change they have been there a while.

I've got two applications to image my hard drive that work in windows, both report cycle error but one keeps going anyway, but that is the crap one making the xml image.

The other made a bzip2 compressed image that stops before it is done.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/howto/

If I remember correctly, Seagate drives have a five-year warranty. If it has any serious problems, back up all the data and send it back for warranty replacement - they do a better job of patching bad sectors than you can.

What imaging software are you using? Did you try the G4L that I linked to earlier?

That above was G4L, no I'm using SelfImage. The problem is that I can't make an image with a linux program until I've installed Linux.

I can't install linux without partitioning the harddrive, which is risky business since I haven't got clean power; lights flicker every couple of hours.

Sector called block 198942386 repaired and passed by Seagate. Only one faulty and since I'm here maybe ok.

The has put me on some pills that make it difficult to think straight, so messing with the op system is frightening.

And now I've got my image; aint windows good, some of windows is as high up the memory as 249Gb after defragmentation.

Is nothing going to be easy on this thing.

When I get my ext harddrive I am putting the image on it with KDE4, and if I make a dumb mistake while partitioning I can get everything back.Hopefully.

Kido is on the move

Just writing a load of zero's to one sector caused 14% fragmentation, how do you get the unmovable files to move.

Still waiting for that drive; she said she posted it on wednesday but I paid my £6.50 on Sunday.

Saw another one on Ebay, £1.45 for a 120Gb seagate but it was many years old and went for near £40, I thought that was how much new ones cost.