I fear some tech problems are forcing me toward the "brute force" method of fixing... wipe the hard-drive and reinstall everything.

I've done it before, rarely, and each time I clumsily lost me MS Outlook Express folders/address book, my IE Favorites Folder and my ICQ info.

Does anyone know the routine used to preserve and backup/reinstall those files in particular?

If anyone cares, my system has developed instability due to a variety of factors I can't pin down. It's happening mostly when I play games (oddly, it began in BG2 just after I entered the Mind Flayer Prison) and it happens a lot in IE 5.5.

I think the problem stems from problems installing DirectX 8.0a. It froze during install and things got odd afterward. Also, new ATI Radeon beta drivers could be the problem...

-Andrew

I did a full reformat install with builiding my new pc... while i kept all my info with browsers and email and othe such junk on another reformatted harddrive. I didnt install anything on the hardrive i backed up data on, all of it was about 2gb of data (lots of it junk .. and porn.. just joking hehe). Anyway it was a one day affair... but my system ran much much smoother when i just reinstalled windows without format... i went from a 2 minute bootup to a 20 second bootup clean! i must have had alot of junk... on my windows.

If you're having those problems... somtimes its better to do a full reinstall.

Yep, sometimes a reformat is the only solution. I'm going to do the same on one of my machines for slightly different reasons (hard drive failed), so I've been thinking about just this thing lately.

Here are my observations:

- In Ie you can back up and reinstall all your *cookies* and favorites here: File>Import and Export.

- If you use Outlook Express, look here for messages and settings: C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Identities{big ass number}\Microsoft\Outlook Express

where big ass number is an actual, er, big ass number. If you have more then one identitity, you'll have multiple numbers.

- Search all your disks for *.wab and you'll get any Windows address books. Default location is here: C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book

I don't know about ICQ, but if you figure it out, please pass it on. It's very annoying having to ask everyone for permission to message them again.

To back up the ICQ contact list, just go to:

http://www.icq.com/icq123/backupconlist.html

I find the easiest thing to do if you have the room is to rename your current windows dir to something else then reinstall windows to c:\windows. Then you lose nothing. The other option is to use norton ghost to ghost your c:\ drive to another partition and reformat and reinstall onto a freshly formated c:\. The norton ghost explorer lets you search and grab files out of the ghost image so you can always get to your old stuff.

Anyway that is what I would do, it give you the best chance of not losing anything. I really prefer the ghost method but if you do the other try to determine where programs you are going to reinstall keep their files before reinstalling. If they keep them in the \windows directory you are ok because you have it backed up. If they keep them in some other directory you might overwrite them (ICQ is horrible about this).

Good luck and feel free to email me if you need any help.

Bub, you got a burner or 2nd drive?
Personally, I just use network neighborhood to move files over to my other PC, but it's the same as having a 2nd drive really.

I copy the Favorites directory out of windows to get all my IE favs, copy the entire ICQ program directory, and I haven't really figured out the export under Outlook yet, so I exported it as a text file... there were only about 10 of the 1000 addresses that I really needed anyway.

As for the format and reinstall itself, here's my suggestions:

1. Boot up on a known clean boot disk.
2. FDISK /MBR
3. Reboot. Format c: /s /u
4. Mkdir c:/win98
5. copy d:\win98 c:\win98 (d being your cdrom)
6. cd c:\win95
7. Setup.exe

Now, your PC will NEVER ask you to insert the win98 cd again.

Thanks all.

The question alarmingly quickly, turned moot, though. Suddenly Friday afternoon (while installing a game) I started getting several Blue Screen "Failure to Write to Disk" errors. Since my HD requires a lovely 4 hour ScanDisk to recover from such errors I dumped all the important files onto the Portable HD and I'm waiting to call Maxtor tech support on Monday.

I know nothing about that sort of Bad Sector error described above. Does this mean, as my
sources seem to indicate, that this drive is heading for death? I've wiped and reinstalled Windows 98SE (and the whole drive) only to encounter the same problem over and over again.

I haven't repartitioned, however. But this seems like an insolveable hardware error and given the increasing crashes over the last two weeks, and the alarmingly quick slide this past weekend, that this HD is toast.

Thankfully my PC intensive review due, is done (in case you're listening Mr. Editor Man) and remaining assignments can be handled on my lil' Laptop here.

If I replace... what brand? IBM Deskstar still the best?


-Andrew the Mad

Bub: Yep. IBM hard-drives are amazingly good for the price.

there were some known manufacturing problems with the ibm drives a couple months back- i normally wouldn't mention it, except that a friend of mine had just purchased one and it went tits-up within 72hrs. it had a manufacture date of April 2001, and it was purchased within the last 2 weeks, so there's apparently problematic drives still in the distribution channel.

he was able to contact the place he purchased it from, and have them ship him out a maxtor drive of similar capacity/rpm (60G/7200rpm) that was a retail kit, and for a tad bit cheaper than the ibm was.

provided you get ahold of an ibm drive with a manufacture date of early may or later, you should be fine. i've had no problems with the ibm drives i've got or have used or installed in other peoples' machines, but i will note that the last time i put an ibm drive in a machine has been over 9 months ago.

currently, all machines i build (for clients, friends, and me) come with maxtor drives (45->60G, 7200RPM typically), and for the past year of building machines for people, i can't say i've had any problems with them. i use some older maxtor's in a fileserver of mine, and they've been running 24/7 for the past couple years (erm, well, since the time 7G drives were "new").

just my (somewhat biased) take on it.

- mike - now, what about the REST of the machine? ;) -

I'll second the vote for Maxtor drives. We use them almost exclusively when we build systems for our customers, and they seem very reliable. I'm pretty sure that I've got a Maxtor in my machine, too, and it has put up with a lot, and still remains reliable.

Did I mention that this drive giving me problems is a 40gig 7200 Maxtor drive?

I'm thinking I may not have mentioned that fact.

;-)

Do those "unable to write to drive" errors sound at all familiar to anyone here by the way?
-Andrew

Well, no one hits home runs every time. ;-)

I know... it was a good drive for the past 8 months - and we game reviewers do put them through hell - but I'm loathe to buy another Maxtor because of it. I am the very model of a modern fickle customer.

Hey, do what you gotta do. I've had the same Maxtor for a couple of years now, and have no complaints. But, Maxtor's never screwed me. If I had a hard drive that died after eight short months, I'd be hesitant to buy another one, too.

I'll be picking up another drive soon, but who knows what that one will be. It's likely to be a Maxtor, but it could be an IBM...I dunno just yet. I'll depend on price and such. We'll just have to see.

Hello! Yes, the drive my wife had which seems to be slowly going is a Maxtor, too! ;)

Mine is a little older than yours, though, and it's not as close to death's door. Once when she booted up, it gave a Non-system disk error and stopped. Like the error you get when you boot up and have a floppy that's not a boot disk in your A drive.

I put a Seagate in and moved the Maxtor to my box. Gonna give seagate a try, but I'm not completely off Maxtor's yet. Most of the other dirves in the house are maxtor.

Yeah, Seagate's pretty good, too.

That's weird that you guys are having trouble with Maxtors, though. We've been installing them in our customers' machines for years, and I don't think I've ever had a complaint. Of course, as Bub said, not everyone is as hard on their drives as we are...But, fortunately, mine's still healthy. I did get that horrid "Your hard drive is full" message Friday night, though. That really sucked. I deleted some old stuff and freed up about 1.5GB, but that's not going to last me very long...I don't know if I have much else that's "expendable." But, at any rate, it's about time to buy a new one...

My son just had a 30GB 7200rpm Maxtor die in his machine but I have an 80GB and 13GB Maxtors that are doing just fine. I think my wifes machine has a 9GB Maxtor in it as well. I also have a couple of 13 GB IBM deskstar drives in my system and the server that seem to do well.

"I deleted some old stuff and freed up about 1.5GB"

I wish I had 1.5G. On my main partition, I have 100MB and nothing to remove. :(

Since I added my new Plextor and my wife's hdd to my machine, I decieded to wipe the drive and start over. This time I decided to do a dual boot with WinME and Win2k. I created a 2g partition on my 10G drive, thinking it might be nice to ghost it when I got it all setup. Pffft. No sooner did I get everything installed, I had a measly 100MB left on C. Grrrr.

I guess I'm going to have to start over with a 3G partition.

Unless... does anyone know of a way to nudge the partition without reformatting the drive?

Huh.

Now why is Maxtor so popular? I believe I have so many becasue they sell them at Costco and I usually get a decent price, without having to order online and pay shipping.

---

Quote:

Now why is Maxtor so popular?

---

Tim, I hear that Partition Magic works pretty well althought I had loads of problems with their other product (Drive Copy). If you have a spare drive you can do the ghost, repartition, reformat, and restore deal. While time consuming it works great. Partition Magic would probably be my suggestion even though I have never used it. Just be careful.

Maxtors are popular, at least this is my theory, because of product placement...

Go to Best Buy. Find me something other than Western Digital or Maxtor. Same with CompUSA (locally). 75% red Maxtor boxes, 25% blue WD HD boxes, nothing else available. Thank you, come again.

I take it none of you HD experts have ever heard of an "Can't Write to Disk" blue screen error then?

-Andrew

I haven't seen it often. I know that it can come about as a fluke -- I've seen it caused by the processor overheating, corrupted system files, or that occasional weird incident that restarting your set can easily fix. But if you can do a fresh reinstallation and have it happen pretty quickly afterwards, then I'd suspect that your solution is correct: You drive is probably fried.

If you still haven't repartitioned, give that a try. Fdisk it, then reinstall. It's time consuming, but way cheaper than replacing the drive. If you still have problems, time to trash it and get a new one.

Partition Magic makes the birds sing and the sun shine. I've owned every version since 1.0 for OS/2. Cumulatively, it has probably saved me whole days of my life that would have been otherwise wasted on partition management activity. DriveImage is also very useful.

However, please note: If you are planning to run a pre-release version of Windows XP and you want to use NTFS, please be advised that Partition Magic and DriveImage are incompatible with the version of NTFS used by Windows XP. Moreover, any existing NTFS partitions you may have are automatically updated to the new version. I found this out the hard way, when I put XP RC1 on a separate partition with my Windows 2000 system. Now I can't do anything with my NTFS partitions in Partition Magic or DriveImage. The problem will persist even if you uninstall Windows XP and go back to Windows 2000.

In typical fashion, PowerQuest has stated that they don't support beta operating systems, so I don't expect to see updates from them to address XP compatibility until November or December at the earliest. Argh.

You know, I have a copy of partition magic that's kind of old. I believe I'm at version 4. However, I can't get it to work in Me because there's no DOS.. PM tells me it has to shut down to change the drive, reboots the machine, and I'm back on the desktop, partition same as it was.

My copy of Win2k is the server version, which PM doesn't like either. Argh. Always something.

Now that I think about it, I could probably mange moving the partition in ME, maybe by using a boot disk or something. Rob, Lee, have either of you tried this or heard about a work around that doesn't involve upgrading?

Thanks Lee, good to know my thinking was in line...

I already put the order in for the new HD so I'll forego the Fdisk hassle.

I supposedly have sufficient fans, but maybe heat is a problem here as well. I've been burning through CD-ROM drives here too. Three in the past 15 months.

-Andrew

I've never known heat to kill a CD-ROM drive, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible. Besides, the instances that I've seen due to heat are more like isolated occurrences. If that were the case, you wouldn't likely get the error message in the same place, and wouldn't necessarily get the same message. More importantly, if you turn the machine off and let it sit for several hours/overnight, it shouldn't do it again for about three hours. System BIOS would tell you that your processor was a little too hot, too, if you checked, and if it got real bad, it would alert you.

Three CD-ROMs in fifteen months? That would make me worry about something bigger...

"Three in the past 15 months"

Jesus, Bub!?!

You're either: a) buying really poor quality parts, b) really abusing the parts you have, c)have exceptionally bad hardware karma.

If it were me, I would bill myself to hardware vendors as the ultimate crash test and attempt to make a profit.

You have a son or daughter there right, Bub? How old is he/she? My CD-ROM drive went on the fritz about a year ago. I thought the thing was dead. Put an old 24x in my machine because of it. One day I decided to open the broken one up to see if I could do anything to fix it. Lo and behold I was bitten by the bit.

My son had put a screwdriver bit into the drawer at some unknown point in the past (well, known only to him) and this was keeping the read head from registering about 70% of my discs when put in the drive. After that was extricated, the 50x was working like a champ again.

So the moral of the story...never have children.

JUST KIDDING! =)

--Dave

Good theory Dave,
but no, my girl is but 15 months now. Walking, but not allowed in my office (yet). i'm sure this room will soon look like Candyland to her....

All three died of broken motors. I THINK it's an electrical thing. I have a full tower and I was using an extension cord thingie a tiny compu store used to put the drive in the highest bin. I fear this cord was faulty or put some sort of evil strain on the three drives.

They were:

An old Creative DVD
A new Creative 50X
A TrueX (that I found problematic anyway, so I didn't mourn that one).

I've had an Acer 52X in there (using a regular cord) for six months now without problem...

knock plastic.

-Andrew

Bub, I hear ya.

Mine are both three and used Paint to learn how to mouse. Three is just about the edge for commercial products for kids: elmo, barney, etc. To tell the truth, though, they like Paint better than any of the other's we've picked up for them.

My suggestion is to buy a case with a little door on it, so when they get old enough and can't resist the lure of the office, you can feel comfortable with them in there... well as comfortable as you can when they're messing wiht all your parts.

IIRC, even with the Windows version of PMagic, you can cut DOS rescue diskettes. I think that's a two disk set by the time you get to Version 4. Do this, but don't use the PM4 rescue diskette to boot. Instead, boot with your WinME Emergency Boot disk (you did create one, didn't you? :-), then run PQMAGIC from whichever diskette it resides upon. In PM4, I think it's on the "help diskette".

The reason for booting from the WinME EBD is that it enables the latest and greatest FAT32 and large disk support, which might not be forthcoming if you use the PMagic Caldera DOS boot.

If this works for you, you can also copy the stuff off of the PM rescue diskettes into a directory on your hard disk. Use your Emergency Boot Disk to bring up the system, then CD to your hard disk directory and run PQMAGIC from there.

A final note: V-Com's "System Commander 2000" will allow you to boot up to a prompt in WinME. However, you may find the price a bit steep for the added convenience, especially if all you run is WinME. http://www.v-com.com

Oh, yes--PMagic 6 is WinME friendly, too. You can run it from Windows, and it works. It works with Win2K, too; it's just XP that it has trouble with.

... although I should note that the non-Pro version of PM6 won't run on the server version of Win2K.

Oh! It also occurred to me that if you're copying files off of the rescue diskettes to be able to run Partition Magic from a DOS partition, that the diskettes contain one or more magic hidden files that are needed for the software to work. I don't mean files like IO.SYS, but I seem to recall one put there by PowerQuest that needs to be copied as well. It should be easy to find.

Urk... maybe I should rename myself "PartitionMagic Johnson". :-P

Ok. So, now I've got a new Maxtor HD (against my better judgement) and I have a new problem. Since y'all seem so familiar with Maxtor I wonder if you've seen it before.

I boot using Max Blast 1.27S software and everything is going fine. It says Hi to my mouse and then loads the screen where you have to click "OK" to begin the partition/format system. Then it hangs.

I remove the mouse and it hangs on the screen where it explains how to use the keyboard as a pointing device.

I tried the software on my Laptop and it works, with mouse support.

This is a BIOS error maybe? It worked before. I used similar software on the older Maxtor drive.
Anyway, I can't call for support until tomorrow and I'm too befuddled by this problem to FDisk manually. I don't want to do that not knowing why my Drive A is hanging like that.

Ideas?

-Andrew

is the machine/bios so old that you require the use of the 'MaxBlast' crapware? have you checked for the availability of a newer bios revision that may support larger drives?

just have to ask, ya know. :)

- mike - just back from chicago after having visited with some guitar gods -

Bub, check your email.

That is NOT a boot disk. Throw it away.

I was lazy and used MaxBlast for my last drive setup. (Actually, I was just curious what it'd do). It'll do a standard FDisk or install that layer for machines that don't support large drives. It has a nice graphical interface for partition sizing too. So Bub wasn't necessarily barking up the wrong tree here. (...and I'm no tech dummy either so I know where you guys were coming from :)

--Dave

I've got an AMD 1gig on an ATI RAID mobo. BIOS is current to early 2001.

I'm actually more concerned as to why this Maxtor software is crashing in my A: drive. Isn't that sort of a bad sign? Maybe a sign of something worse? Dogs and Cats, living together... Mass Hysteria!

And Dave's right about the software, it's just FDisk made fast and EZ, no big deal.

-Andrew

Bub,

your motherboard should be able to support your hard drive without the maxblast software.

since maxblast seems to be causing a problem, you may consider just doing away with it and doing a straight-up fdisk of the drive and such.. like you said, "it's just FDisk made fast and EZ, no big deal" -- unless it doesn't work...right? :)

- mike - maxblast and software like it are evil -

Yeah, I'd second that. I never had any trouble with fdisk, and see no reason to cause extra trouble.

Honestly guys... next time you get a Maxtor drive, have a look at MaxBlast. It's not nearly as evil as you think. In fact, I was pretty impressed with how easy it was AND how good it looked for a DOS program. The visual representation of your drive and its partitions (graph) made it much easier for me to determine what size would be best for my partitions. No number crunching necessary.

They also do a good job informing the user about that drive layer stuff that you're concerned about (and which Bub obviously knows isn't something he needs).

--Dave

Dave, i've used it before.. long, long ago, when i really needed it. :)

i'm sure it's changed since i last used it (it used to be based off of a package called 'OnTrack DiskManager').

at any rate, i typically don't bother to partition my drives to begin with anymore (unless 98 is going on somewhere).. and then i use fdisk. i'm familiar with it, it does the job, doesn't have all the bells and whistles i _don't need_, etc,etc.

to each their own and all, i guess. :) but in this case, if the software is causing your machine to puke, i'd probably not wanna run this apparently non-evil entity.

- mike - i didn't like OnTrack DiskMangler much, either ;) -

Yeah, I used OnTrack with a 4GB drive in a Pentium 120 from Gateway that wouldn't recognize that large a drive. That was wicked software with magical properties. I never questioned its wizardry, just was glad it worked.

MaxBlast is a whole other animal though. It's a graphical interface for fdisk and much more user friendly for home users. I'm very familiar with fdisk (I've used it more than I care to think about), but MaxBlast is definitely a nice alternative.

In Bub's case, maybe his floppy drive is crapping out? He's noted that he's blowing everything else up in there regularly. I'm ready to put him in the same hardware bag with Evil Avatar. ;)

- dave - who thinks MaxBlast is getting a bad rap :) -