Other Norton Products

[Brian_K]

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TonNortNuby wrote:

  Anyway, I hope I've adequately explained the *actual* reason for wanting a drop-in drive in my previous posts, which isn't reflected in the scenario you painted.  

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I don't keep a spare HD to drop in if there is a HD failure. You usually get warning of an impending HD failure which gives you time to buy the latest generation HD and restore your images. The average HD lasts 5 years so I'm more interested in being prepared for software issues. I don't feel you are prepared for software issues as you only have one backup. Sometimes viruses take weeks to become manifect and if you have cloned your HD0 in that period you may be in real trouble as both HDs will be infected.

[TonNortNuby]

I agree, it's not a good comprehensive strategy.  As I mentioned in the past, when i get more familiar with messing around with partitions, I will probably fall back to a practice of making images and incrementals.  I'm not sure if it would be in combination with clones or what.  But right now, I prefer to have a drop-in replacement.  I can't recall whether I described the origins of my interest, but I had experienced a slew of consecutive boot failures.  It likely wasnt the HDD, but Toshiba Tech support said I had to format my drive (*not* do a chkdsk, since the diagnostic info was apparently not as good).  That would have put me back into the stone ages, since I install things like cygwin (a linux like layer that runs on top of windows), and I have a whole whack of configurations that go with that, distributed over an admin and user account.  And then there are the usual windows things that takes days (nay, weeks) to get back to normal from a virgin state.  So a drop-in replacement would be very, very comforting right now.

When I was encountering the consecutive boot failures, the fact that people *usually* get advanced signs of disk failure was of little comfort.

[redk9258]

It sounds like a separate PC is what you really need. What if the motherboard dies or power supply dies, etc.

[Brian_K]

Not trying to be cynical but Red has a good point. In my computers I've had more motherboard failures than HD failures. But I don't keep spare motherboards.

[TonNortNuby]

Another computer...oh how many times I've thought that.  But that means twice the admin, and unless they are the same models, I'll have different issues to deal with.    Also, I have very little space right now, so the less stuff the better (for the moment).  Once I deal with other stuff, that may change.

At any rate, it takes a lot of time to do due diligence to even one machine (unless you're already an IT person), and often, I wonder whether computers are easing our lives or we're simply caretakers and servants (nay, slaves) to the computers.  Not that we can live without them in this day and age.

I spoke to Toshiba again, and they repeated the need to recover to factory state, so I'm glad I spent the time to figure out the clone.  Even if I do restore from the clone again (or simply use it as my main HDD), they said the recovery process itself will uncover any motherboard or other hardware issues.  The virgin state is just a side benefit (I consider it a debilitating cost, myself).

Of course before doing that, I exhausted all other possibilities (Hitachi DFT, which doesn't see my HDD, chkdsk, memtest68+, Toshiba PC diagnostic -- as far as they are concerned, my PC is healthy).

Since things have changed over the last few days, I'll refresh the clone before restoring to virgin state.  I'm going to review your instructions about only cloning the C-drive partition.  Something I'm confused about is that I have to re-clone the C-drive partition to partition #2 (of 4) of the target, yet a partition cannot exist because Copy Drive should target unallocated space.  I'm assuming that deleting the volume will turn that spot into the required unallocated space, so that there will actually be two swaths of unallocated space (I had to leave a bit of unallocated space after partition#4 before Ghost would actually clone partition#4).  Hopefully, I won't run into error messages about the target being too small, which is what caused me to leave excess space in the cloning of partition#4.

[redk9258]

Toshiba wants you to restore to the factory state so in case you caused some problem with Windows by installing incompatible software, bad update, incorrect driver, malware, virus, etc., they don't have to deal with that. They know that restoring Windows to the state it was shipped in from the factory will fix any software / OS problems and probably bring the PC back to a good state of operation. You can do the same thing by creating an image of the PC when all of your software, drivers, etc. are installed and operating properly.

[DaveH]

It would be real easy to tell if the Toshiba hard drive has a problem.

Take it out of the system and use the Seagate.  If the hard drive problems go away then it was the drive, if they don't then it's a software issue

[TonNortNuby]

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redk9258 wrote:

Toshiba wants you to restore to the factory state so in case you caused some problem with Windows by installing incompatible software, bad update, incorrect driver, malware, virus, etc., they don't have to deal with that. They know that restoring Windows to the state it was shipped in from the factory will fix any software / OS problems and probably bring the PC back to a good state of operation. You can do the same thing by creating an image of the PC when all of your software, drivers, etc. are installed and operating properly.

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Yes, that's of course the easiest way to rule out any issues arising from changing the laptop in any way.  But a laptop in its virgin state is of limited use.  Computers are meant to run apps, which must be installed.  I don't install weird advanced things like games or low-level things, don't overclock, etc..  My apps suite is as innocuous as can be...FF, cygwin, office 2007, audacity, SpybotS&D, MalwareBytes, Vim, various PDF printers, iTunes...I've got a whack of startup scripts for various apps in cygwin and for vim.  Cygwin is a pseudo OS unto itself, but I don't they it messes with low level stuff -- it goes through Windows API.

Eventually, I would like to have programs and data separated so that I *can* take a snapshot of the system...but I wonder if that would solve the problem with losing my environment when Toshiba wants to revert to factory image.  I mean, it's not the user data that corrupts whatever it is that they think is corrupted.  It's the installation of programs and updates which they think might be causing it.  So even if I start from a virgin image and reapply all the updates and installations, I'll re-do whatever it is that they wanted to avoid.  For that matter, if I recover from a snapshot of a system image, I'll simply re-import the problem.  And it is back to the age-old feud, with the laptop vendor blaming the updates/apps.  So the only value added from recovery is to perform the diagnostic and get the info on hardware problems.

Now, I'm speaking about this with a fairly shaky understanding, so I welcome any enlightenment.

[Brian_K]

TonNortNuby,

Have you tried Dave's suggestion? Sounds good to me.

[TonNortNuby]

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DaveH wrote:

It would be real easy to tell if the Toshiba hard drive has a problem.

Take it out of the system and use the Seagate.  If the hard drive problems go away then it was the drive, if they don't then it's a software issue

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Brian_K wrote:

TonNortNuby,

Have you tried Dave's suggestion? Sounds good to me.

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I think I need to explain more of the story.  The consecutive boot failures happened once in December, and it happened after a BSOD -- I get them every few weeks.  It was the boot failures that caused them to want a recovery, but I suspect it is because I didn't thoroughly power down before booting up.  Meaning that I didn't pull the battery.  When I did that, things seemed to work.  However, they still think a recovery is the way to go because I still get BSODs once every 0 to 3 weeks.  The recovery process will yield diagnostic info that can apparently indicate whether there is a hardware problem.  I dunno, maybe motherboard related or something.

Now, they say that I can re-install everything afterward, but it's easier to just clone back from the clone (or use the clone as the main drive).  As I mention above, it doesn't seem to matter in principle whether I manually rebuild my environment or clone it back because if it is the problem (rather than the hardware), I re-introduce it either way.

Why did I explain all that in response to your suggestion about Seagate?  Because the inducing problem is not the boot failure, but intermittent BSOD.  It doesn't show itself right now even without replacing the HDD with the Seagate (which I have done, and it works fine).

Regardless, it seems like the HDD might also be a problem, albeit a diferent one.  I followed the advice on another forum and ran Everest Home Edition to get a S.M.A.R.T. report.  It shows 696 realloacted sectors (raw value), which I'm told is a very large number, strongly indicating a failing HDD.  I don't know much about SMART (very fitting, I know), but Wikipedia says that it is not a very standardized standard, so maybe "knowing about SMART" is an oxymoron.  However, it does say that reallocated sectors is a bad thing.  Pretty sobering news for a drive that is about 1.3 years old (I'm not sure when the BSODs started -- well before December).

I could work off the Seagate for a month or two to see whether the BSODs are good and gone, but my warranty runs out at the end of the month, so I'm trying active diagnostics in the mean time.  Including Toshiba's recommended recovery.  After that, it's a toss up of when to actually test the Seagate for a month.  Instinct says to stay with the Toshiba HDD because if it goes BSOD again, at least I'll be able to say that my first report of the problem was in December, well within the warranty.  That starts to get iffy if I wait a month before using the Toshiba HDD again.