Help needed

Does anyone know of a tech in the Austin area that does motherboard soldering? I need to replace a Dallas cmos/clock chip and it's soldered on, and after calling all around town, nobody does that kind of work...

Show up at Luby's on a Tuesday night and you'll find about 100 folks who can do this at the ham radio club meeting. See http://www.repeater.org for meeting times, days.

I work Tuesday nights...

Maybe they can switch the meeting to Little Italy?

HELP! I've formatted the wrong harddisk. How can I restore the data? I've switched the PC off after this, and immediately took the HD out, so nothing accessed it or overwrote sectors after the mishap.

My only guesses are: do you have a recovery program, like one of the Norton's? take it to a shop that does data recovery.

Huh, ever done the shop thing? Place where I worked had the same prob once, and shipped the drive to London to pay heavy, I remember something like 7.000 british pounds. Oh, and they did get results for it, too... But I'm still no-budget, can't do that... Does anybody you know tried doing this with the Norton tools?

nope...

Terry? Ray? Anybody else here who knows about this stuff?

Try Nortons.

Norton's Utilities, right? Been to Symantec's website; they offer so much... And if it is "Utilities", which of the zillion tools would do this? There's Unformat, Unerase, Disk Doctor, Crash Guard...

not sure...I was just guessing...let me ask someone tomorrow and see if they know...until then see if you can find out more about Unformat and Disk Doctor...

From http://www.symantec.com/nu/fs_nu4-9x.html#features , this is not helping me a lot. Gonna call their tech support... They tell us about fixing Windows registry proplems, catching aborted tasks and the like, but nuthin' about the down and dirty and dumb like restoring one's hd. Norton Utilities 4.0 for Windows 95/98 Powerful Solutions to Fix and Prevent Computer Problems Overview Norton Utilities� gives you more effective problem solving than any other product. NORTON UTILITIES 4.0 makes using your computer safer, easier and faster. It detects, prevents and repairs more hardware and software problems than ever. It gives you more control over how to solve Windows 95 and Windows 98 software and hardware conflicts. It troubleshoots modem problems that prevent you from logging onto the Internet. It protects against system crashes and data loss. It optimizes performance, speeding up your computer. It updates itself and other applications. It provides the most advanced disaster recovery available. Why trust your computer, your data, to anything less than the most complete and powerful utilities available? Key Features Solves PC problems quickly. Norton System Check� gives you all the power of Norton Utilities� at the click of a single button. It not only finds problems, it also suggests how to fix them. You can run Norton System Check manually, or, in Windows 98, schedule it to perform periodic maintenance on your PC. The new Registry Doctor scan provides extra protection by fixing unsuspected corruption in the Windows registry. Saves your work from crashes. Norton Utilities comes with Norton CrashGuard�, a $29.95 value. CrashGuard automatically protects against application crashes and screen freezes. It stops crashes from becoming major disasters by helping you save your open documents and letting you get back to work quickly. Rescues your PC from emergencies. Available only in Norton Utilities, the improved Norton Zip Rescue� feature allows you to save rescue information to an Iomega Zip or Jaz drive. It also lets you easily restore missing or corrupt Windows files. The Rescue Recovery Wizard guides you through the process of restarting and fixing a system that won't boot. Together, these two features let you boot to a full working copy of Windows, and save your work and critical system files. Fixes Internet connection problems. Don't let modem problems keep you off the Internet. Norton Utilities now includes Symantec's unique Connection Doctor�, which tests your modem to ensure that it's working properly and has no hardware or software conflicts with your PC. Then Connection Doctor uses a troubleshooting wizard to help you quickly solve any problems it finds. Maximizes your PC's performance. Norton System Doctor� continuously monitors your PC to keep it free of problems and running at peak efficiency. System Doctor can fix many problems automatically-without interrupting your work. Speed Disk� improves system performance by minimizing file fragmentation on the hard drive so that files can be read and written faster. System Requirements IBM PC or 100% compatible computer 80486 or higher processor Windows 95 or Windows 98 (this product will not run under DOS, Windows 3.x, or Windows NT) 8 MB RAM (16 MB or greater recommended) 70 MB free hard disk space for typical installation; 47 MB for compact installation CD-ROM drive (double-speed or higher) 256-color VGA or better video Optional: Sound card Optional: Iomega� Zip� or Jaz� drive

Got it all back, courtesy of Norton Utilities 4.0's tool Unformat. Feels good to have the E-Mails back... Why I'm not hopping up and down, mad with joy? Mad as hell, that's why! And joyful and happy that for ONCE I've preceded a disaster by smart side-step. After recovering my data, I put yet another harddisk into my crate, an old 540 MB one, to use exclusively for business files i had up till then stored EXCLUSIVELY on a ZIP cartridge (so I could juggle between the PC and the Mac)... Need I say more? DISASTER 2.0 Two days later, Click Of Death(TM). My, the very luck to have copied the whole ZIP cartridge's content onto the new disk... I of course immediately made another backup of that on another harddisk. I mailed Iomega to ask for advice, gotta wait and see what comes of this... Meanwhile, I've searched the web (using the Go! thing here on the Spring - another 2 c from the heart!) for the story on this. The best informed and flame-low is probably http://grc.com/clickdeath.htm , but there are zillions of people out there that are quite upset... Like certain grapgic designers I know who recently lost a drive, too - plus data on the media... The mentioned site tells what to do, what to use and what chances are to recover data and get an replacement of the faulty drive.

Oh, by the way - Symantec's tech support was really friendly and competent and advising me how to use their product and gave me even a customer number for 60 days of free phone support BEFORE I even bought the Utilities! I had just called to inquire would they think their product could help me... (The german phone support accidentally has a 069 area code, which is Frankfurt, but the call gets routed to a call center in the Netherlands... Modern times, I guess.)

Didn't get the replacement Zip drive yet. But the saga continues. Remember the harddisks I mentioned ("an old 540 MB one, to use exclusively for business files", "another backup of that on another harddisk")? Looks like both are history, too...

OK. everybody, if you can tell me anything about any of these products, feel free to do so. I've surveyed the market, and these tools seem to relate to my current set of disasters: Gibson Research Corp. ( http://grc.com/default.htm ) SpinRite Symantec ( http://www.symantec.com ) Norton Works Norton Utilities (don't do the job - can't find the drive...) PowerQuest ( http://www.powerquest.com ) PartitionMagic Lost & Found Search & Rescue Especially the last two products look like they might be worth the try... And something else - folks, please *DO* backup. And backup the backups. (You've heard that, Wolf and Wer? It's eaten MY website, MY everything... Three times in ten days! You don't want to live through that, trust me.)

Yesterday, All those backups seemed a waste of pay. Now my database has gone away. Oh, I believe in yesterday. Suddenly, There's not half the files there used to be, And there's a milestone hanging over me The system crashed so suddenly. I pushed something wrong What it was I could not say. Now all my data's gone and I long for yesterday-ay-ay. Yesterday, The need for backups seemed so far away. I knew my data was all here to stay, Now I believe in yesterday. (Just a reminder...)

Yes, and I've seen that posted in enough offices in my lifetime. Thanks for your sympathy, it makes me feel SO much better, ha! Backups: I had trippple copppies of evvverythinggg - one on a Zip cartridge, which passed away Sunday last week, and one on each of the drives! I mean, after restoring the harddisk mentioned above (response 5), I learned something. I put in a old spare disk, put all crucial data from the Zip on it, and from the restored drive also all really important stuff. Then first the cartridge goes, as my Zip drive died (acute "Click of Death"-syndrome), and six days later BOTH harddisks (due to physical impact)... I'm looking into obtaing PowerQuest's "Lost & Found" and a new disk. Anybody around with experience with Lost & Found?

not I...

On the other hand, Ontrack is back in the game. Their product Tiramisu (!) sounds at least as promising as Lost & Found, plus you can download a trial version that will diagnose the drive and tell you which files can be restored. Only then you have to buy the software, which is approx. USD 20 more that PowerQuest's offer, and can restore the data to a new drive. What's special about Lost & Found and Tiramisu is, they don't write to the damaged disk. They both just read off it to a new drive or Zip or Floppy. The nice thing about this is, no sectors get overwritten, and unless the read/write heads physically damage the disk, you still have all other options left (including sending the drive to Ontrack's or PowerQuest's labs...).

So did you recover your stuff?

Not yet... But I'll diagnose the drive with the test version of Tiramisu later... Also, I still wait for the replacement Zip drive. I want to restore that damaged cartridge first, because nearly everything important is on there - the harddisk was the backup for that, and vice versa...

What are you going to do after you get everything restored to prevent this from happening again? Have you thought of running a drive array, as in RAID?

Terry, this is an excellent question! And I have tried to ignore it as good as I only could, at least until I got something back. But since you aked... What am I going to do? Getting some serious RAID amounts to having funds for a RAID controller plus a bunch of disks, e.g. 5 x 4 GB. What's that, RAID 5 or something, right? RAID 2 - that was disk mirroring, I think. Either a controller again, or software mirroring. What I've seen in this area didn't convince me - took the folks a hard time to just to get it into operation mode without any error messages. After a crash, the mirrored disk that was still ok wouldn't act ok. Or do you know of any cheaper way - reliable software mirroring or the like? Perhaps some freeware miracle-working stuff I could rig something up with - I got some spare parts floating around here... My best guess: separate PC with large disk and a cheapo hub. Use that box as fileserver - no more data on work desk machines - and put a weekly backup on Zip cartridges (four to six of them, rotate 'em, gives six weeks security). Not much that I would have to buy - costs: under USD 400. Would give me basic networking, too. What do you say? Any better idea? Any comment welcome!

that's what I'd do if I had the cash...

Raid 5 in decent config starting approx USD 8.000 (you DO want some reliability here...). Terry, what do you say?

I'd say make sure and have a bunch of redundant hard drives, even if you have to do it manually.

OK, how do you like this for starters: (1) Weekly backup on a set of Zips, rotating them. Do one, store offsite. (2) Three HDs, on which crucial data is manually duplicated in like cycles ("sweat equity mirroring"); perhaps even daily during "hot" production phase. (Remember, I DID do weekly backups - just I lost both HDs and the Zip I put them on...)

My zips are still in the package, as is the drive. Full of good intentions but I keep forgetting about doing it until I am too tired to think straight. Any suggestions ???

DO IT NOW!

Yes Sir!!! (rummaging in my drawer hunting for the package I know is hiding in there...) You will save me a lot of grief in the long run. Thanks!

It's never too early to back-up stuff... Nor too late... (at least until something happens). My disk has been inaccessible again a couple days ago. �$%&!!! Thanks, Norton Utilities! Works again now.

Norton has saved my backside more times than I care to remember. Bless the genius who created it and made it available to us mortal souls.

Indeed, to us, and to our mortal souls!

Followed the above discussion with interest having had wierd episodes recently - like a large number of essential exe files disappeared after I'd used add/remove programmes to remove a programme. Ended up reinstalling win98. I'm sold on norton uninstall deluxe and will never use the win98 add/remove programmes. Anyone tried McAfee Nuts and Bolts? I have a HELP query. I've tried both Norton antivirus and the McAfee virusscan, and I'm having trouble getting any downloaded virus updates to unpack and get used. The latest problem was with McAfee virusscan where the virus update downloaded fine but refused to unpack saying there's not enough disk space to expand the file. I have 1.5. Gb of hard disk free. I think there may be a temp file problem , but i can't find where andnhow to clear it. Any ideas anyone?

No. I use F-Prot.

Maggie, I have a $70 investment in McAfee software which was once downloaded ont my hard drive but made everything run so slowly then freeze up that I deleted it. Gonna have to have a talk to their tech staff. This is not uncommon, I hear. I have also gotten that insufficient space information and I have 6.4 Gig of hard drive space.

Computer Acronyms (Blame John!) PCMCIA - People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms PENTIUM - Produces Erroneous Numbers Through Incorrect Understanding of Mathematics WWW - World Wide Wait COBOL - Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language CD-ROM - Consumer Device - Rendered Obsolete in Months OS/2 - Obsolete Soon, Too. MIPS - Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed WINDOWS - Will Install Needless Data On Whole System MICROSOFT - Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers LISP - Lots of Infuriating & Silly Parenthesis RISC - Reduced Into Silly Code SCSI - System Can't See It DOS - Defective Operating System BASIC - Bill's Attempt to Seize Industry Control IBM - I Blame Microsoft DEC - Do Expect Cuts

Operating Systems You probably know that Windows, MacOS, and Linux are popular "operating systems" for a computer, but do you know what an OS actually does? It is much more than just the pretty face that manages all of your windows and lets you browse your files. On the most fundamental level, operating systems are about managing system resources, including memory, processing time, disk space, network connections, graphics and screen real estate, printers, and all of the other peripherals that you can attach to your computer. For example, even when you are only running one application program, there are generally many more programs running in the background, and the OS is responsible for scheduling them so they each get a fair chance to run on the CPU. And it prevents them from writing over the memory that the other is using.