I have no reason to suspect Drive Image Pro since I have
been using it for years and it has not caused any problems.
With Win2K ? And have you been restoring from that for
years or just doing the copy for years and have only recently
started to restore when the boot drive got corrupted ?
Why would DIP contaminate the boot record on a target disk
cloned from a source disk that booted successfully?
Its not necessarily 'contaminated'. Booting copys of the NT/2K/XP
family is more complicated than with the Win9x and ME family.
Something else is going on.
Maybe, depending on what you have actually been doing for years.
You do not know all the facts.
I do know what fact you presented if you stated them accurately.
Most dont get anything like that effect you claimed was the problem.
* The memory report on POST was wrong. I have 3
128 MB sticks in yet the POST reported only 2 sticks.
* The mouse cursor was not responding properly and when it
did come back it would jump all over the place. Finally it stopped
working altogether, even when I booted into DIP using Caldera DOS.
* A couple of my INI files for applications like the firewall and the
proxy filter became corrupted and lots of information was lost.
Sure, but thats evidence of a problem, not evidence
that the problem is DIRT IN THE POWER SUPPLY.
On the other hand here is what I observed:
* S.M.A.R.T. from both the BIOS and from
Norton did not report any disk problems.
Yes, it looks like its not the drive given the
list of problems you have now presented.
But unless you have a full SMART report like you get with
Everest, just because the bios and Norton didnt warn you
about the drive dying doesnt prove much at all.
* Except for the problems stated above, the system worked properly.
That may well just have been a dying mouse.
Thats not an uncommon way for mice to die,
usually due to a failure of the cord.
When the mouse quit I had to learn how to use
the keyboard to navigate, which is really fun. HA!
Its not that bad once you get them stuck in your head.
I still do not know how to invoke a right click
The Win key.
- and I hope I never have to learn.
* After reinstalling Win2K on the "corrupted"
boot disk, it worked just fine.
* After restoring to the boot disk, and overcoming the boot
record problem by using Win2K Upgrade Repair, it worked
just fine. I am using it now and I do not detect *any* problems.
That just shows that the original problem that corrupted the
hard drive so that a restore was necessary is intermittent.
* When I blew dry compressed air into the power
supply it looked like a lifetime of crap came out.
Sure, you do get quite a bit of dirt out of them, but
that does not prove that that was the reason the
drive got corrupted so that you needed to do a restore.
I can't believe we overlooked the PS
when we periodically cleaned the MB.
Most dont bother to use compressed air on the PS and
dont get the drive corruption you saw that needed a restore.
I've never bothered to clean a PS and have never
had that result, even in the most humid weather.
What could be relevant in this case?
The MBR and boot.ini. You've already
checked the boot.ini and its not that.
There's more than just those two tho, the boot phase of the
NT/2K/XP family is surprisingly complex, particularly if you
ever did boot the copy of 2K in the removable carrier.
Maybe thats why the restore of that failed most
recently, you hadnt previously booted the drive in
the removable carrier, just copied it back using DIP.
When I built the DIP archive I told it to
verify writes. No problems were reported.
Sure, its not likely to be corrupt in that sense.
I have used it successfully in the past and in
this instance I have no evidence that it failed.
The evidence that something failed is that 2K refused to boot it.
The hard drive removable carrier. You previously said
If that is the case then why did DIP not report a problem?
Did you get it to check the restore copy after it had done that ?
Again I mention that I have never had this problem and I have
been backing up my boot disk on a monthly basis for 5 years
now. 60 backups and no problems until now.
It aint the backup thats the problem, its the restore.
How often have you needed to restore it when running 2K ?
I opened another thread about the Enermax backup device
but no one has responded. I am considering a new way of
creating disaster recovery backups. I do not like this DIP
method - it's so primitive. I mean who boots to DOS
anymore (and I am an old DOS assembly hack).
True Image can do the copy at the Win level.
And yes, the DOS approach is a dinosaur now.
Even the True Image bootable CD doesnt use DOS,
its linux with a full GUI if you have to use that because
the hard drive is too corrupt to even start Win anymore.
Then there should have been no problem.
I never had a problem like this before.
Again, its the number of restores that matter.
The cause of the corruption was secondary to a flaky system
Yes.
caused by humid dust in the power supply.
You dont know that and thats very unlikely indeed.
Once I cleaned it the system has not caused any problems.
Doesnt explain why others arent seeing a
problem with PSs that havent been cleaned.
I've never bothered to clean any of mine and have
never had a corrupted hard drive due to the PS.
A flaky PS is my best guess.
Very unlikely indeed for the reasons above.
I have a motherboard monitor utility that I have been watching
the votages with and so far none of them has gone out of range.
Those arent very useful on that. I did see some voltage that
were out of range in the motherboard monitor ute and used
a decent Fluke multimeter with peak hold to check that and
found that the voltages reported by the motherboard monitor
were way out compared with what the Fluke reported.
Many years ago I had a 286 system that would crap
out when the PS got the least bit dirty. I had to blow
it out all the time and then the machine would work.
I've never ever had that effect.
You sure its not bad karma or grave dancing ?
So I am not the least bit surprised a filthy PS
caused me the flaky problems I experienced.
Doesnt explain why others who dont bother to
clean their PSs dont see hard drive corruption.
But that is not the issue.
You dont know that either.
Once the PS was cleaned the system showed no problems.
You saying that report of the memory and the mouse
problems when away when you cleaned the PS ?
Quite frankly I dont believe it.
What did happen was that I could not boot from a restored
archive on my boot disk. That is the real issue here.
Yes, but you dont yet know why that happens.
I made the archive a week before any corruption occurred.
The problem aint making the archive, its restoring it.
I am going to low-level format all my
disks before I implement any new RAID box.
You cant low level format modern drives. What the drive does
when told to do a low level format is to write zeros thru the drive.
We have a high humidity problem in Houston,
It aint the only place that sees high humidity.
so I would not overlook that. If you
do not run a/c your house will mildew.
It aint the only place that sees that effect either.
The home insurers have dropped mildew protection because
it has gotten bad even for people who have a/c.
And most in Houston dont clean their PSs
and dont get drive corruption when they dont.
You don't know Houston mugginess/
Wrong again.
I think the PS needs replacing.
Quite possibly. Its certainly something thats cheap to try.
Yes, heat does exacerbate the humidity/conductivity problem.
Nope, there is no
I posted the boot.ini files from the two disks
in a separate post and they are the same.
Sure, but there is more involved in the boot
than just boot.ini with the NT/2K/XP family.
I do not like the fact that Win2K can't find the boot device when it
is the very same disk that it found before the archive was restored.
It can if the restore is done properly.
I do it all the time on the test system where I have a number
of canned installs in image files that I restore and run fine.
When I did the Upgrade Repair, the Win2K installation
process did something to the disk to enable it as a boot device.
It fiddles with quite a bit of stuff. The only real way to work out what
its fiddled with is to do a snapshot and compare the before and after.
