Tag Archives: Storage

The nightmare of the new hard disc drive

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Okay, so I found that I couldn’t reformat my old hard drive because it was corrupted.

I backed everything up on an external drive. Backing up emails is easy, but restoring them is less so.

I bought a new 1 TB Sata hard drive over the internet.  Sata HDDs are much more common now that IDE drives and much easier to connect. As I installed it, I took photos of the old one within the case so I would remember how the wires went. I can’t find them this minute, because these photos are untitled.

I inserted everything correctly finding where the cables went.   I started installing Windows XP and pressed F2 to see Set up or BIOS. I saw that the new Hard drive was there. I changed the boot up sequence so that the computer would boot up from the Windows disc.

At a certain point the Windows disk would stop and it would say “no hard disc detected”. Installation has failed. I tried every combination of BIOs settings and boot sequences. No luck.

Finally, I rang a tech company and when the guy came out, all was well, except that my version of Windows did not contain the drives necessary for the motherboard and new HDD. So off it went to the factory and 3 days later at came back all fixed.

I’m restoring everything now. Thank God for the password reminders on web sites, because of all the folders in my outlook email account guess which one didn’t restore. My passwords!!

It’s very nice to see updated software from the web though.

So, if your motherboard is old and that only means a few years, then your search on the internet for how to change a HDD (which is easy) won’t bear fruit. If it is newer, it is a synch really.

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Backing up your photos

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While the bushfires were raging in Victoria, Australia, I’m sure many of us were thinking what would we take with us if we were in a hurry and we knew our house would probably burn down. Many think of their photo albums, but these days most of our photos are on the computer. Of course one could run with the hard disk, but rather bulky when you only have minutes to get out. An alternative is to have an extra external hard drive which would be easier to take.

We used to have CDs to back up our photos to and we still do, but how to find them in a hurry unless you are well organised? We also now have USB memory sticks but these items are also ones which cannot be in the house if you don’t have much time to get out.

The answer is to store them on someone else’s server.

If you have your own self hosted blog or web site, you can easily upload them via FTP (Filezilla is free) to your host, depending on the plan you have and how much room is there. They don’t have to link to your web site or blog;  just let them sit there. Create a folder called ‘photos’ on your host’s server. Of course, if you change your host remember to download all those photos to your own computer again. I lost quite a few photos by forgetting that once.

Then there is Flickr You can store as many photos as you like here and you don’t have to show them as public photos.

Everyone has an ISP. Most of these allow you to make a small web page for free. You could use that.

Also there is Google’s picasa - you can upload to this and make your photos private.

Off-site, online storage is really your best bet. Now, all you have to do is upload!

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