> From: Kevin Tarr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

> I have two seperate questions, the first may relate to Ronn's problems.
> 1. Over the last year my niece and nephew have gone through four hard
> drives. These were name brand, WD, store bought hard drives. Two of the
> failures were instantanious, two built up over weeks until it was
obvious
> that something was wrong. Is there any notices about hard drive
failures?
> The real question: what do you experts do to look ahead for problems? I
know
> I can't get teenagers to do any weekly checks, but could these problems
been
> avoided?

Norton utilities.

Not much you can do against a head crash tho [besides keep several
complete backups].  The C: partition on one of my maxtor hd's just
suddenly had a head crash one day (while loading windows 98).  Took down
almost all of windows files that were still loading, and norton utilities
could recover _nothing_.  But I had backups of backups of backups, so I
was able to replace all the affected files.


> 
> 2. From Alberto's message, I was wondering about something. From the
little
> work I did with NT, it seemed like passwords were hidden. If a user
lost or
> forgot his password, the only thing a sysadmin could do is reset the
users
> system, the user had to input a new password. The sysadmin couldn't see
what
> the actual password was. I take it that this is not true accross all
> systems? Obviously if I lost my password for Amazon.com, it could be
> e-mailed to me, but I just figured that some hidden mechanism was
involved
> in this. My password was kept on the system but no person other than me
> could see it. Just wondering.

No way to find out what a NT password is.  That is as it should be [tm].

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