I'm typing this on my backup computer. The hard drive on my main machine crashed this morning and now I have to but a new hard drive.

The irony of all this is when I called Compaq's service department, I talked with a person in India that I could barely understand. He charged me $40 and didn't have a clue what to do. Now, after a couple hours work, I determined the hard drive crashed. Another tech from India is supposed to call later tonight. Wonder if I'll get my $40 back without calling Visa to contest it?

Just another fun day in Paradise,

Gary

MAJOR BUMMER!!

Good luck. Hope you can get this reconciled quickly.

Gary, that's what you get when your hard drive finds out you're going to "but" another one.

I love typos - they make reading the forum so much fun

I meant to say BUY. Oh hell, it has been one of those days when Mr. Murphy's law prevailed!

cheers,

Gary

Hey Gary....I just bought a Hard Drive for my Tyros on e-bay, 40 Gig for $43.00 new.... http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZcfidirect
this seller has all types new with warranty
good luck.....Tony

Thanks Tony,

I'm gonna' stop at Best Buy on the way home from tomorrow's gig and buy one. Can't afford to be down long enough to wait for shipping. Not much more money there anyway.

Gary

With prices of HDD's going lower and lower, you could have the cheapest HDD you can find, hook it up to a USB device and back up all your data regularly , even doing complete "ghosts" of all the data you have.

That way you would be able to just unhook the HDD from the USB device, and plug it in th PC, and hey! it is back to normal.

Although you can achieve "total" security wit a mirrored RAID configuration, with 2 HDD's, I think it is a bit of an overkill and also sometimes the Power supply dies and collateral damage includes CPU's, RAM, HDD's so a backup disk will probably be fried along with the primary one. Try to keep the eggs in different baskets.

I hope the curent situation does not have a lasting effect in your work

Nearly al of my most important data is backed up on CDs, therefore, it's just a matter of installing the hard drive, installing the programs and hardware drivers and going back to work. The biggest loss was about 1,200 new photos that were shot during the past two months--they were still on the hard drive when it crashed. Putting them on CDs was this weekend's project. Oh well, now I guess I'll just have to go fishing and shoot new ones--damned lousy job, but somebody has to do it!

Cheers,

Gary

Gary,

Sorry to hear about your CPU problems. Good think your CPU literate otherwise they would take advantage of you.

I recently purchased a USB 2.0 External Maxtor Hard Drive with 300 Gig storage for $200. It actually does automatic backups of my two other hard disks. This is a Godsend on many levels.

If you can come up with some extra $$$, I recommend buying the external as a backup device. It's also cool that you can access it from other computers and even works with some keyboards.

Al

I think I saw one of those stand alone external HD (with like 100 gigs or so) for like $50-$100. For that price there is almost no excuse to lose data !

With free softwares like synback or probably free with the HD, it's pain free. No need for CD's I would think. And it's backed up every night.