Posts Tagged ‘Floppy Drive’

Always Keep a Boot Floppy Handy for Hard Drive Recovery

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

Lison Joseph is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the best online backup tool — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/always-keep-a-boot-floppy-handy-for-hard-drive-recovery.html

Expect the unexpected, as far as hard drive recovery is concerned

Well you have absolutely no idea when you might need a hard drive recovery because of a belligerent hard disk going south on you! One fine morning when you boot up, your BIOS might just refuse to detect the hard drive. These things happen for no apparent reason and the only thing you as a computer user can do is to be prepared. This does not mean that all users should prepare against all the permutations and combination of ways in which their system can hang up.

However, there are a few basic things that every user can and ideally should do. One such is to have a clean bootable floppy ready, always.

Bootable floppy in the context of hard drive recovery

Well, In the first place, if you do not know what a bootable floppy is, then it is high time you learnt more about what is the process of booting and what are the different ways in which it can be done. For starters, booting is the process of detecting all the hardware and loading all the required operating system files when the computer is first powered up.

There are several ways of booting, like from the hard drive (as is usually done) or from a CD or even from a floppy drive. Booting from devices other than a hard drive is usually necessitated by a non-functioning primary boot device (read hard drive). So a bootable floppy is the first thing you are going to need if you want to get into your system and take a peek at the hard disk to determine what is ailing your storage device and then decide on your hard drive recovery strategy.

You might be wondering how a system knows where to boot from when the power is switched on. It is here, the BIOS comes into picture. The BIOS has information about boot procedure and you can manually configure this to set a boot procedure of your choice. For example, you can set it first, seek the hard drive and if it fails, then try to boot from the CD drive and if that too fails, then seek the floppy drive. So even to start contemplating hard drive recovery, you should be comfortable finding your way around various SETUP options in BIOS.

So how do you make a bootable floppy, the first step towards hard drive recovery!

Frankly, it is quite simple. In most windows versions you can do a search in Windows Help with string, “boot floppy” or “startup disk” and you will get the exact procedure for making an MS DOS start up disk. If you are well versed with DOS, then all you need to do is insert the floppy disk and use the format command on the floppy drive. Do not forget to use the “/s” switch so that the required system files are copied after a quick format.

Now that you have a boot floppy is ready, you are better prepared to face a hard drive recovery scenario!

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Home Data Backup in Windows XP

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the best online backup software — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/home-data-backup-in-windows-xp.html

Possible Problems with Windows XP Data Backup Facility

The data backup facility in Windows XP is developed by Veritas, and works reasonably well on a small scale. It is very basic and has next to nothing in terms of whistles and bells, which is the root of its potential drawbacks. It has no media spanning; the ability to copy the data backup file to more than one disk, or whatever your preferred media is. If you are copying only your data file this is probably not going to be a problem, if you want to copy the whole drive it may be.

A second problem is that XP data backups are not compatible with Windows 98. If this is a problem, because you have some old data backups for instance, there is a way around it – you buy the commercial version from Veritas.

Another problem that some may find is doing a complete backup on a PC with no floppy drive. As a complete backup includes creating a recovery disk, it will return an error if there is no drive to create it on.

Deciding What to Put into Your Data Backup

Deciding what files to put into your data backup will decide whether you can use the XP data backup. If you have the installation disks from all of your applications you can get away with backing up only your data files, almost all of which are stored by default in My Documents making life very simple. You might also want to backup the registry, and you should beware of applications that store their files in dedicated, non-My Documents folders. The ones to watch are anything that works on text or graphics files.

Using Windows XP Data Backup

You will find it by going through Start/Control Panel/Performance and Maintenance, and you will see ‘Backup your data’.

If this is your first time, a wizard will appear, giving you two options. The simplest to decide is wether you want to ‘Always Start in Wizard Mode’. The easy answer is yes, but if you feel confident uncheck it. The other option is ‘Advanced Mode’ that not surprisingly offers more options.

Following the Wizard by clicking next gives two options, backup or restore. Since we are doing a data backup the choice is obvious. You now get four options of what to back up, select ‘My Documents’ unless you have reason not to, and click next. The next screen asks where you want the backup to go; the default is the desktop. Go with this. If you select ‘Finish’ now you will get a default backup.

You will see an Advanced button here, clicking this allows you to choose which folders to copy, whether it is a normal, copy, differential, incremental, or daily backup with explanations of the differences, and the options for verifying – always select this! – and volume shadow copy that allows files in use to be copied. Next you get the option to append or replace existing files, and finally run now or later.

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