Sorry to hear about your problems. It shouldn't have to be that way. End your PC and Windows woes and go Linux or Mac. Don't know about XP but setting up RAID Mirroring on the Mac is point and click and took about 30 seconds.
Free yourself from the M$ death grip.
This is a great site with great people. Glad you are here!
Think RAID Mirroring and drive journaling. You'll never lose another bit of data again.
Steve, to be perfectly honest, I really wanted to join those that don't have to be a "hands on" system administrator type after my retirement from the local telco. I just wanted Microsoft to do the driving and let me enjoy the ride, "point and click", like most seem to be able to enjoy. It worked for almost 4 years now and I really enjoyed it.
Microsoft unleashed a flurry of software updates this year that caused me problems on 2 out of 3 of the PCs that we own. Now I'm a little suspicious that Microsoft may be attempting to force everyone to upgrade to Vista by butchering up XP. I've also ran into a compatibility issue between Norton Internet Security 2007 and XP on one PC, so I'm holding off on upgrading the other 2 PCs until Symantec comes out with a fix for the problem. Strange this compatibility issue would come up just after Microsoft releases their own version of internet security software isn't it!?
We run a small family owned and operated business (extra retirement income) with one PC and a software update from Microsoft for the IDE driver caused XP to not be able to access the drive and boot properly, the "last known good configuration" option cleared up that problem quickly-what a great driver update!
On the PC that I use exclusively at home and suffered the total loss of data, there seems to have been a conflict between a Microsoft driver update to the keyboard/mouse driver that Trend Micro Anti-Spyware stopped after the required update reboot started! When the reboot completed, XP thought it had no keyboard/mouse! I tried the old "safe mode", "last known good configuration" wouldn't work because the boot sequenece was successful-just no keyboard/mouse (ain't it a great OS that believes everything is OK when there is no way for user input) and a couple of others things but ended up just sticking the "system recovery" CD in and bringing it back to life in it's original configuration-all personal data lost.
Something in the range of 15-20 gig of radio related files lost- military, broadcast and ham. I've recovered about 13 gig total from DVD/CD backups and the web-that was fun!
I leave the external hard drive unplugged and manually mirror the internal hard drive to the external about once a week, if I find a really good piece of info on the web then I immediately add it to a DVD backup file. Unfortunately there seems to have been several good websites for info that have disappeared in the last 2-5 years.
Microsoft and PCs are quickly falling in with XYls, "can't live with them and can't live without them".
By the way, this is a great website and I wish I'd have joined years ago!!!