Tag: Vista

Backup the Backup

After many years of accidentally deleting or losing data, I have come to a point where that should no longer happen.

When my old machine died, I thought I would turn it into a backup server.  I was unable to make that dream come true as it was too far gone to resurrect.  I was however able to find an adequate machine for $50 that does all I need it to.  I wanted something that would be able to work cross platform as I currently have 2 windows machines and I want to eventually buy a Mac Book.  The only option that seemed to be the right decision was Linux, specifically Ubuntu.

After working on many different options, I found what I believe will be the easiest and best way for my specific situation.  I have samba running on my Ubuntu Intrepid machine with the built-in windows backup client backing up the machines on a weekly basis.  While I haven’t researched it  yet, from what co-workers have told me Apple’s time machine program should work much the same.

This link was the clearest on how to set samba up:  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202605

From there it was just like sharing folders or drives in Windows.

Now that my testing is complete, I can add some hard drives and put it in production mode.  My wife is so thrilled that she shouldn’t have to worry about losing data anymore.

Resurrection…..Well Sort of

It turns out that my computer wasn’t on it’s death bed, my hard drive was.

For the past few months I would have these symptoms:

  • The power supply was extremely loud after being on for more than an hour.
  • No response on occasion, which would lead to a reboot.
  • Slower than normal function.

It all came to a head when all of these symptoms came together and after a reboot I got the dreaded message, “Disk Read Error.”

I knew the hard drive wasn’t dead, but there was a problem.  I switched the power cables and it worked.  So I backed up everything onto one of my other hard drives and purchased a new drive.

I bought a Western Digital 160 Gig PATA drive, that I must say is super quiet.  You have to put your head up to the case just to hear it!  It turns out that one of the pins on the 4 pin power connector had “sheered” away.  I gave it to my co-worker Tito, I’m sure he can get it going again.

I knew my computer would run Windows XP, but I thought I would see if it could handle Vista.  I think it runs Vista better than it ever ran XP.

I’ve had a few glitches, but nothing that wasn’t the case about XP years ago.

The biggest scare was last night.  I’ve been re-installing all of my software, using my DVD-RW drive.  When I went to install MS Visual Studio Pro 2008, my drive was nowhere to be found!  Vista gave me a message that “there was something wrong with the driver.”  After some searching I found that Vista has a quirk with some older drives.  A quick registry patch resolved this.

While my computer cannot import video or audio directly anymore, it is working great as an all around PC.  This is awesome news.  I’m not feeling the pressure I was to purchase a new machine anymore.  I can hopefully wait until our renovation is complete and I have a new office area before acquiring more equipment.