Piggybacking HD's dont work, why?

[Jr. Woodchuck]

Here at my office we seem to be having some serious problems with our Dell computers. My boss loves the HD diagnostics feature that the dell mobo's run by hitting ctrl+alt+d at the bios load screen. Normally the drill is that when she finds a failure using these diagnostics, she asks me to backup any important information on the HD.

Obviously I can't use the HD because there is some sort of failure with it, so I piggyback it in a windows 2000 system. Of the 4 times i've done it, once my windows 2000 system assigned virtual memory to the piggybacked HD. Which caused a mess. Now we always use a spare computer to use for the piggybacking process.

2 of the 4 times i've piggybacked, I was only able to backup half the desired information. I will get halfway thru the backup move, and then the computer locks up. When I re-boot the computer, the bios wont recognize either HD. If I remove the piggybacked HD then the computer will boot up as normal.

What I want to know is; Is there a better O/S to use instead of 2000 for purposes of backing up information? Note: Everything is Fat32 here.

Also is there a better way to backup then piggybacking?

 

[Ice Czar]

so I piggyback it in a windows 2000 system.

your booting to a parallel install? (dual boot on a different HDD)
and then backing up?

If Im understanding you correctly
Knoppix can do that

 

[Jr. Woodchuck]

your booting to a parallel install? (dual boot on a different HDD)
and then backing up?

If Im understanding you correctly
Knoppix can do that

What i'm doing is booting off a windows 2000 computer and the piggybacked HD is simply setup as a slave to the already existing HD in the box (which I then setup as Master). So when I get into windows I see the 2nd HD which is the one i'm trying to pull information from.

 

[Great_Melinko]

what os are the dells? alos why are you still using fat32?

 

[Jr. Woodchuck]

what os are the dells? alos why are you still using fat32?

The dells are normally 2k and XP. There are still a few 98 machines lieing around but they are getting phased out rather quickly.

As for the fat 32 question, <big sigh> the computers come from Dell with NTFS on them, but my boss when she does the installs she formats them as fat 32. There are many such cases where she does things "different" and perhaps not always the right way, but i've come to accept them, because she's my boss and well she's my boss.

Regardless i'm trying to solve the problem as to why they hang occasionally when I have them piggybacked on a 2k machine? Also I'd like to know if there is a better way to retrieve data from a HD thats acting funny?

 

[Great_Melinko]

The dells are normally 2k and XP. There are still a few 98 machines lieing around but they are getting phased out rather quickly.

As for the fat 32 question, <big sigh> the computers come from Dell with NTFS on them, but my boss when she does the installs she formats them as fat 32. There are many such cases where she does things "different" and perhaps not always the right way, but i've come to accept them, because she's my boss and well she's my boss.

Regardless i'm trying to solve the problem as to why they hang occasionally when I have them piggybacked on a 2k machine? Also I'd like to know if there is a better way to retrieve data from a HD thats acting funny?

swap it into another machine is still the best way that i know of, you should let your boss know if she ran ntfs you wouldnt have so many problems

 

[Jr. Woodchuck]

swap it into another machine is still the best way that i know of, you should let your boss know if she ran ntfs you wouldnt have so many problems

Thanks for your reply, but whats wrong with running Fat 32, besides the obvious security issues?

 

[Lunas]

http://www.logicube.com/

 

[defakto]

If you're the IT guy/girl, you should be making the choices on how the computers are setup and run, not your boss, unless he/she is the head of your department department.

 

[Jr. Woodchuck]

If you're the IT guy/girl, you should be making the choices on how the computers are setup and run, not your boss, unless he/she is the head of your department department.

My boss makes the decisions, she's in charge.

 

[Great_Melinko]

Thanks for your reply, but whats wrong with running Fat 32, besides the obvious security issues?

ntfs is more stable for the most part.

 

[Cardboard Hammer]

What i'm doing is booting off a windows 2000 computer and the piggybacked HD is simply setup as a slave to the already existing HD in the box (which I then setup as Master). So when I get into windows I see the 2nd HD which is the one i'm trying to pull information from.

It'll go quicker if you put the drives on different channels. Just pull the cable from your optical drive and plug it into her hard drive and you shouldn't even need to monkey with jumpers.

 

[Bullitt]

I'll have to agree with Ice Czar. Knoppix is what you want for the lab-machine.

You probably want 1 machine you can "piggyback" the suspect drive and a data drive.

Boot from teh knoppix CD, set the data drive to be read/write and the piggyback drive to be read-only (avoiding flub-ups). Knoppix will read NTFS and read/write to fat32.

This way you can retrieve files from the suspect drive and write them to another drive that can be put back into a working live machine.

 

[Elledan]

Thanks for your reply, but whats wrong with running Fat 32, besides the obvious security issues?

Put simply, fat32 is more 'simplistic' than NTFS. fat32 comes from the same family as fat12 and fat16, which are used for FDs and pre-Windows 95 MSFT OSes (including DOS) respectively. Basically, fat32 only adds the ability to store larger files (up to 4 GB) on (larger) partitions.

NTFS, much like filesystems used on systems from IBM, SGI, SUN (e.g. JFS, XFS), is a so-called journaled filesystem, basically this means that all changes (writes) are kept track of, which greatly reduces the chance on data-corruption.

Of course, NTFS is severely crippled even when compared to a FS like Ext3, in the sense that it lacks some more advanced features and poorly implements others. An NTFS volume requires to be defragmented quite often, for example, because it writes segments of a file nearly randomly on the disk.

It's still the obvious choice over fat32, though, when limiting oneself to those two FSs.