Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Tech & Science

With Windows, Know How To Prepare For The Worst

It’s not a question of whether Windows will one day self-destruct on your PC. It’s a question of when.

Take the recent experience of Gerry Letteney. After a hard week at work, the Maryland-based engineer came home and booted up her Windows 2000 PC – only to find that the system would not respond to any input from the keyboard.

“At first, I thought my housemate must have simply pulled out the keyboard cord from the PC,” Letteney said.

Soon, though, Letteney discovered that Windows 2000 simply would no longer recognize her keyboard.

After a couple hours of attempting to repair the machine, Letteney decided that the only course of action would be to reinstall Windows from scratch. That, in fact, was what allowed her to get up and running again.

But the process of reinstalling Windows and every application that she used meant a weekend, more or less, of time spent sitting in front of the PC.

How can you avoid this type of disaster? The short answer is that you cannot.

Like it or not, most PC users resort to reinstalling Windows every so often, either as a result of a system meltdown (as in Letteney’s case), or out of a desire to get their PCs running at top speed again.

So the challenge becomes finding a way of getting your system back to normal without spending days, or even weeks doing it.

Here are some time-tested methods for solving the problem:

Ghost your PC

Ghosting refers to the process of taking a “snapshot” of your hard drive as it currently exists. In the event of a system meltdown that would normally require you to reinstall Windows and everything else, you can instead turn to a ghost image of the drive or partition on which Windows is installed, and restore everything exactly the way it was before the disaster.

Ghosting differs from backing up your system in that backing up does not take a byte-for-byte snapshot of your drive. As a result, it’s often difficult to return Windows to its original state merely through restoring a backed-up drive.

In addition, backups are usually done to tape, rather than a fixed medium such as a hard drive, and therefore can take a long time to restore.

The leading ghosting package on the market is Symantec’s Ghost 2002, (www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal), which is now compatible with Windows XP and previous versions of Windows.

The beauty of Ghost is that it can be run from a simple 1.4MB floppy disk. A popular alternative is PowerQuest’s Drive Image (www.powerquest.com/driveimage).

A respectable freeware ghosting package is MrMirror, which works similarly to Ghost. MrMirror can create ghost images on Zip and Jaz drives, as well as hard drives and networked drives. It’s available at www.webattack.com/get/mrmirror.shtml.

Stop installing from CDs

If you must reinstall Windows and you do not have a ghost image to rely on, the next best thing is to ensure that your original Windows installation disk and all of the programs you wish to install have been copied to a local hard drive or partition.

The key here is that if you have to reinstall everything, you don’t want to have to do it from installation CDs. Installing programs like Windows from a directory or partition of your hard drive will cut your installation time at least in half. The reason is simple: Hard drives are much, much faster than CDs.

Copying your CDs to a hard drive is feasible these days because of the massive sizes of today’s drives. The procedure that many veterans use is to create a folder with a name such as “applications” on a drive or partition, separate from the drive or partition on which Windows is installed.

Within the “applications” folder, create subfolders for each of the applications that you rely upon. For example, if Microsoft’s Office 97 is a standard part of your software arsenal, then create an Office 97 subfolder.

Copy the entire Office 97 installation CD into that subfolder. Use the same procedure for each of the other installation CDs that you have.

If a serial number or registration key is required to install your applications, you may also wish to create a text file containing the registration key. Use the Windows Notepad text editor for this purpose. You could call the file something like !serial.txt. (The exclamation point at the beginning of the file name will ensure that the file appears at the top of any directory listing.)

Once you’ve finished, you can now quickly reinstall all of your applications from a local drive or partition – without having to shuffle CDs in and out of your CD-ROM.

The added advantage of this approach is that if you install programs that require additional data, that data can be searched on the drive from which it was installed, rather than having you reinsert the installation CD.

Install from a hard drive

Finally, don’t forget to copy all of the original Windows installation files to your hard drive, again in a partition or drive separate from the one that you intend to install Windows to.

Also, remember to include a text file containing the Windows serial number or installation key. The Windows installation routine will run much faster from a hard drive than from a CD-ROM. Plus, when Windows has to look for additional files in the future, it will not ask you to insert an installation CD. It will remember where on your partition or hard drive to look.

These tried-and-true methods won’t prevent Windows from self-destructing, but they will make your life significantly easier when disaster strikes.

You may also like:

World

Calling for urgent action is the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)

World

Immigration is a symptom of a much deeper worldwide problem.

Business

Saudi Aramco President & CEO Amin Nasser speaks during the CERAWeek oil summit in Houston, Texas - Copyright AFP Mark FelixPointing to the still...

Business

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal infers that some workers might be falling out of the job market altogether.