Last week my Toshiba Portege M200 motherboard fried itself. This is not surprising, considering I bought it as a factory refurb. The great thing about factory refurbs is that they come with a factory warranty which is extendable. I bought the four-year extended warranty.
Toshiba, like most modern tech megacorporations, has shitty tech support. The Canadian “tech” I talked to diagnosed hard drive failure. Having worked on PCs for 15 years now, I knew he was wrong, and found a local Toshiba authorized dealer who could look at the system in Atlanta. I removed my perfectly working hard drive prior to dropping it off, just in case.
I back up all my files on all my computers nightly, but since I am likely to be getting deployed to Iraq in October or so, the fried motherboard got me thinking. What are my backup plans for Iraq? Well, I didn’t have any.
So I got one together. I purchased a second 2.5 EIDE hard drive (the kind that go in laptops) and got my hands on a legitimate copy of Norton Ghost 9.0, which advertises a feature called “Hot Imaging.” Hot Imaging supposedly allows you to make exact copies of your hard drive on the fly. Hot Imaging also doesn’t work. At least it didn’t for me. That’s why I think Norton Ghost 9.0 sucks. Older versions of the product would allow you to boot into DOS mode to do your drive copy operations, but this version DOES NOT. So basically, if you can’t get your drive imaging/copying done withint the Windows environment, you’re screwed. Stay away from this product.
A better and cheaper option is http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/. It will let you make a boot CDR or a boot floppy, or any other bootable media, so you can do your copying in a DOS environment.