After having almost of every piece of technology in my house fail, I’ve decided to value backing things up (even though I haven’t lost anything yet) and having back up plans. So here’s how it went after the last post.
I’ve had the problem of not having a DVD drive in my Dell Inspiron 1100 for a while, but after I bought another laptop, I figured it was time to re-install Windows, as it needed it very badly. But then the question arose, how do you install windows without a CD drive?
Well my first thought was to pull the hard drive out and image it using a basic Windows install from another machine and then just change all the drivers and SIDs and stuff. But just before I was about to undergo that, the CD-R/DVD in the my BenQ Joybook R55 (the laptop I bought from a friend) died. So then I had two laptops and neither of them had CD drives. Hmmm….conundrum.
It’s at that point that I needed to take a trip to the computer district. Now if I haven’t told some of you about the computer districts in China, allow me to expound on them now. China likes to put everything in the city in one place, like all the bars, or all the camping supplies or all the computers. This is not a rule, I think it just happens. And so when it happens, that place gets referred to as a “district”. So in Nanjing we have a stretch of street about 3 city blocks long that is nothing but computer stores. At the end of that stretch is a 7 story shopping complex that contains any piece of personal computer technology you could ever want. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find anything in there. So off I went to look for a CD-R/DVD drive for my BenQ.
Now, previous to this experience, I thought that these drives were proprietary to a specific machine. I suppose I have never given it much thought, but I assumed if I wanted a CD drive for a Dell, I needed to ask Dell. But it turns out that these drives are not proprietary, only the piece of plastic on the end of the drive is. So I’m strolling around the “computer mansion” as I like to call it and find a glass kiosk that only sells CD/DVD drives for laptop computers. Awesome. So I start relating my problem and about an hour I’m walking away with a Korean-made CD-R/DVD for about $50.
It only dawned on me later that I should have done the same thing for my Dell. But I arrived home and start thinking, why don’t I just put that USB CD drive inside the machine? Well, let me shorten the story by saying that after unscrewing and taking apart computers and CD Drives for about 2 hours (and breaking lots of stuff in the process), I just took the new drive I had just bought for my BenQ, put it in my Dell and installed Windows.
But after that dilemma was over, I started thinking about imaging and if I could just re-image the computer I’d never really have to install windows again.
Enter Acronis True Image 9.2. I had used Acronis a few weeks earlier to take the installation on the 60 gig SATA drive that came with my BenQ and move it to a 250 gig SATA that I had purchased. It worked perfectly. I have never seen imaging go so smoothly. I popped in the boot CD, I hooked up the 250 (inside a USB 2 enclosure) and booted up. Acronis found the partitions on the 60 gig and allowed me to resize them and copy them to the 250. Then I popped in the 250 and booted up and it was like nothing had been changed. I was happy.
So I’m thinking I’m going to do the same thing to the Dell. The fact that I don’t have USB 2.0 or a CD drive is still true, but since Acronis supports USB devices, I just take the hard drive out of the Dell, put it in a USB enclosure and then copy an image to my BenQ.
Now a friend gave me this next idea. I want to keep a running backup of my C: partition in case anything goes wrong, so now I have a D: partition for images, drivers, and system utilities and once a week I use Acronis to do an incremental backup image of C: and put the file on D:. So I have 2 images for my BenQ there, one that is a clean install, and one that is a running backup of the last good configuration.
I’ve been thinking about getting even fancier using VMware and a tiny imaging program called Drive SnapShot 1.3. But once I get that figured out, I’ll talk more about it.
By the way, I fixed my GameCube but no word as of yet on my XBox. Actually I didn’t “fix” anything at all. I just bought a new power brick for the GameCube on “Chinese Ebay” as it’s called around here ( taobao.com ). I have to say I’m impressed, I told a co-worker (and avid taobao shopper) what I needed and found a link to it and 3 days and $10 later, I had what I needed. 3 days!!! And $10!!! There is nothing in China that happens in 3 days!! I was floored. The only problem now is that I’m 62 hours into Twilight Princess (using a GameCube disc and my friend’s Wii) and when I try to go back to the GameCube it says the memory card is corrupt. I had the same problem going from a GameCube save and playing on Wii. So I guess you can use GameCube games on a Wii, and you can use GameCube memory cards on a Wii, but you can’t read GameCube games saved on a Wii. Oh well, I’ll finish TP and then give the Wii back.
I may need to go again today and check on my Xbox, but my hopes are getting pretty low.
