I still submit that imaging programs beat the pants off things like casper, but if you guys love casper, that's wonderful.
Just putting information out here so people who want to know about something that might be better can have it and make informed choices.
Hope you guys never loose your data 'grin'.
At 03:45 PM 8/3/2009, you wrote:
all you need to do with a desktop is have someone install 2 mobile rack adaptors in 2 free 5.25 inch drive bays after that you can swap out drives in seconds to backup or restore a drive without haveing to open the box. . in windows. with speech with casper. for both backups and restores because you can boot from the backup drive to restore the crashed or failed drive. or restore to a new drive in windows with speech. after you have completed a backup you can remove the backup drive so a virus can not infect the backup. like when surfing the net or playing on line games or music etc. because the backup drive is not there to get infected this way. casper also has the ability to restore from a external u s b drive if you have version 5. like with a laptop. but this kind of restore would not have speech. but all the files on the drive are still availible to you as normal files so if you messed up a document or deleted a file or folder they could be copied back with normal copy and paste commands. not all deletions go to the recycle bin and these files would be lost if you did not have them backed up.----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Belle" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, August 03, 2009 1:22 PM Subject: RE: Dell systems and suchWell Mike, glad you wrote about this I can always depend on you for a good debate, but still feel respected I know you know your stuff, and if it works for you, that's wonderful.But here's my reasons for prefering imaging even if I didn't use dos, but restorable media, or some other os to restore with like linux.With casper, you need a whole different hard-drive or several to have different set-ups, with imaging programs you can use one hard-drive and restore from an adjacent partition.For laptop users, this is really good, and for people who don't have a caddy system or who aren't comfortable with swapping out hard-drives or hands in the box, imaging is better.We must remember that just because we're handy flipping up the hood and digging around in the box, this is scarey stuff for some of our blind brothers and sisters, even some of our finest programers here don't do their own hard-ware adjustments.Also, it is much easier for a virus to travel between boot sectors of a hard-drive than to infect an image, of course you can always disconnec the old drive but when you have them both hooked up to do transfers, you are vulnerable so this means changing out drives all the time, or having to un-hook and hook up your back-up drive all the time, I don't know about you but I make images all the time with different set-ups and I may have 5 or 6 images with all kinds of different stuff on one hard-drive, but you'd need 6 hard-drives to do 6 set-ups and to get to them you'd have to hook them up and run in windows.Now any nasty litle bugs could much easier hop over to your system drive. I might get a boot sector virus in dos, I can back up my boot record witha dos boot record savor, and restore it, but I can also put an image on a dvd or cd which means it can't be written to and is save from corruption.I can also put images other places on the net.Ok, so what happens if your drive you want to boot from isn't made active for some reason?I think casper would work for simple set-ups but for multiple partitions and complex set-ups, also with dual boot systems, it might not be enough, maybe you could elaborate somemore.Also with sata drives, it's easy to wear out those little connectors they're only meant for about 70 disconnects, I'm a careful tech so can milk it for more, but they're not designed to plug and unplug a lot so you'd need 2 dedicated caddys front loading drive bays to make this really effective.And most folks won't have that.So I submit that the most effective thing to do is to have a small boot partition with your system stuff, and to image that.It just gives you more options and would work for more people.But I'm interested to hear you tell me more about casper if there's something I should know about it that might change my mind, I like to give things the benefit of the doubt, I sure don't know everything.At 03:00 PM 8/3/2009, you wrote:Chris, I simply disagree with you about Casper. I've used it for years within Windows without having to mess with DOS or restoring images and such and if I want to boot to an earlier version I simply insert that hard drive and I'm done. I've also used it many times to upgrade to a larger hard drive or to keep going in cases of drive failure. I respect your methods, but for me they are more work with no gain so I'll continue to use Casper, not because I'm afraid of DOS or that I don't know how to use the methods that you are using, but because it simply does the job quicker for me and I still have a full working backup that I can switch to within five minutes or less. Plus I get to have NTFS with all of it's security reliability improvements and yet I'm able to function on my own with no sighted help in cases of upgrading drives, replacing failed drives, recovering from had installs of stuff etc.At 04:36 PM 8/2/2009, you wrote:What is the name of the list? It says gw-info right?I see topics on here relating to all kinds of access issues, book sense, email programs, etc.Butch and I are using a gwmicro product to access our computers, it might be an older product, but we happen to have gained a lot of independance from said product used in a productive way, namely to do back-ups.I see messages all the time concerning this sort of thing, and as stated in the email, access shouldn't be a window's only approach, we limit ourselves even worse than we already are when we do this.So useful information on how to do vital tasks like backing up, and any products accessed with any gwmicro products, even legacy ones I consider to be relevant and on topic.If Your system crashed, and I was next door to you, and I could teach you how to get all your stuff back with an imaging program, you might like it if someone showed you how to do such a thing or had information about it.Blindies don't seem to care about such things anymore, but they sure scream and holler when they loose their stuff.I'm glad someone took the time, another window-eyes user by the way, to show me how to do back-ups with ghost, which got me started, and then I discovered image for windows and dos and linux, and then drive snapshot.because system restore can't compare or casper, or any of these windows only solutions just don't cut it to a full blown imaging program, which gives lots of security, and the reason I post publically is just incase there's anyone interested out there who might benefit from knowing about such, and the remote off-hand chance that they might investigate and learn to do something outside what seems to be the very inadequate prescribed norm these days which is top tier access only.I believe I mentioned that drive snap shot worked with window-eyes too, so that makes it definitely on topic.So what back-up program do you use?And does it work with window-eyes and will it save your bacon and get your system back for you if you have a hard-drive crash or virus, or other problem?At 03:13 PM 8/2/2009, you wrote:Sorry for asking, but how does this thread relate to Window-Eyes? Ralf Kefferpuetz Germany MSN/Live: [email protected] Aim: RalfKatEMC Skype/Yahoo: rkefferpuetz7747 -----Original Message----- From: Chris Belle [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, August 02, 2009 8:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Dell systems and such Unless you'd rather I didn't, I'll go public with this so others might benefit since I think it's very relevant for people like ;us who aren'thappy with just a top level access and who use older stuff as well as newerstuff to give us greater independance. I really appreciate your encouragement and the conversations we've had through the years keeping some of this stuff going and comparing notes.We've been able to avoid lots of problems using imaging problems, it's savedyour bacon numbers of times, just like it has mine. I have a good teching buddy up in Ok who believes strongly in it, and uses dos still to tech with, and he builds machines and everytime, hands down,even though it's got it's limitations, I think it gains up a lot of controlthat blind people in windows only don't get.They'd rather spend hours playing with registry cleaners, and spyware tools that don't really work, when it's so wonderful to hit the bitton, walk away and go get a coke, and come back to a system fresh as the day you bought itwith all your favorite stuff installed the way you like. Ok enough evangilizing, I just want people to know that old technology can be great and is worth preserving and using when you can, I like what that other cat said about something not being obsolete because the computing world says it is but only when it quits serving your purpose. Drive snapshot is a german made software which makes images to another drive, much like image for windows dos and linux does.YOu don't have the gui in dos, but you can use batch files, and it does textwrites so you can see progress and all. In windows, you get a nice gui. One executable works in dos and windows, and also opens up image files for you to look inside. It doesn't have the extra drivers like image for dos for cd and usb access and such, but you can install those yourself.It's a great tool, and I've starting using it because it allows me to get tomy ntfs drives without that memory limit that ntfspro has with image.exe. 1600 fsb is 1600 front side bus. That's the fastest processors supported at that time. Driver genius is a program that can save out drivers for all your devices, and also find them on the net for you.It doesn't do as well on the later part, but if you want to restore a system and don't have driver disks handy, and you need to grab your drivers out ofan existing install, driver genius is great, and it works with we.I had an older version around here, so that might have been the problem withnot finding the netcard drivers, but still, I made it work. Yeh, well, the only way you could get around having integrated paripheralsis to install xp on that machine, run driver genius and then re-install 2k.And then use the drivers you got out of xp. For an older machine 2k is still a better option since it doesn't hog asmuch as xp, so great for anything like a p2 anything less than a 700 or 256megs of memory, I say put 2k on it or w98. Well, if you do it all yourself, and really go budget and get your own parts, you could do a 3gig 2 core machine for probably 5 bills.But this machine here was built by sonica labs, and it's decked out with allthe finest stuff from that time, passive cooled video, big quiet power supply, it was when the first run of 45 nm stuff first came out, and I got it loaded with 3 big sata drives and 2 good burners and 2 gigs of ddr2 memory.Sonica labs replaced a machine no questions asked when dhl mangles the firstone, which had an asus mobo, and they gave me a better machine to replace it, better mobo I think gigabyte mobos are better than asus. This board has 2 pci slots, 2 pci express 16 slots, and I forget how many pci expressone slots, but it's got all the other stuff I mentioned in the other email.What's good about this motherboard is that it does ide immulation very well,even to the point of being able to load a dos cdrom driver to access the burners.Some of the lesser motherboards won't do that, ide immulation from the biosisn't all created equal. Also for a music machine, sonica labs disabble ahci mode, which makes itbetter for us doing installs and such, and also apparently timing issues andsuch in windows is better when the hardware controls things. This makes sense, as we used to disabble pci steering and do dedicated physical irqs to a slot for our audio interfaces back before things got robust enough in windows to handle it. Now we don't do that so much. But apparently, even though ahci mode offers hot swapping and other cool stuff, the experts say let the bios handle it.Which while we're running these hybrid systems, is the best thing right nowfor people using their computers for the stuff I do. Because if you enable ahci mode, you'd have to have text mode drivers, and unless your using nlite which isn't perfect, you'd have a bitch of a time with unattended installs, those text mode drivers can be tricky, and you couldn't get past the part when xp asks for a disk.there are some voodoo you can use with the unatend.txt file, but safe to saytext mode drivers are harder to deal with. Ok, I don't know everything, and I'll probably get some rocks thrown at meby people who haven't got anything better to do than to be jerks but here'smy understanding of why we don't have safe mode or talking installs. The same bios which helps us out and makes windows and the whole pc work better in one situation also has boxed us in. That's why you need a bios upgrade everything they add a new bus or change drive geometries, this is old 80s technology, very limited memory, and legacy dos level stuff, and there's no memory to load drivers and software to make things talk. Intel around 98 I believe it was if I remember the white paper I read released efi I believe it stands for extended firmware implementation orinterface, some such, and this basically does away with the bios and allows the computer operating system to talk to the hardware directly from the getgo, this is what apple uses, and the reason it can run windows natively isthat it immulates the old pc bios, but because other operating systems haveleft the bios behind, there's much more memory and resources to do stuff like what we want. They don't have the real mode limitations, so if we want voiceover to talk me through an install, no problem. But with the old bios stuff, when you barely got enough memory to do thesebig drive geometries, and even start to talk to all the stuff we've crammed in to a modern pc, you can just forget about loading software for a talkinginstall. I'm sire I don't have it 100 percent right in all the particulars, but that's my layman's understanding of things. When we get efi based systems, then a lot more stuff will be possible, and hardware upgrades will be much simpler, I believe the one good thing about vista I saw was that efi implementation has started. I don't know much beyond that, only that with all the hasles we have with the bios, and the translation that has to happen, and the handing off towindows and such, that efi will speed things up a lot and make compatibilityeasier. This will happen in time, but microsoft is dragging it's heels behind everybody else as usual.Well, atleast we have imaging down, which get's us out of having to use safemode to fix a hosed system, botched driver install, etc. It's not the best solution, but it works every time, pc acts up, if you can't fix it reasonably quick, just image your system drive, and your back in business.Keep email and other junk off on other partitions, and nothing get's hosed.YOu know, that 137 gig limit might be the key thing here, I should try and re-size that partition and see if it fixes my issue. I used to think it was the 4k line thing, I had the same problem with fat32 when I first got these drives, and then I re-formated fat32 4k line, and it seemed to fix some things, but the problem is back. So maybe 4k line fat32 is some of it but not all the problem. At 10:26 AM 8/2/2009, you wrote: >I've never tried drive snapshot. Does it make an image or just keep a >mirror image on another drive? I use fat 32 on all my stuff. makes >life simpler. I had the same problem with sata drives on dos, I think >there is some doundary around 137 gig that dos won't see. I generally >partition all my stuff on larger drives. I guess sata is faster, but >I've had less problems with ide drives. I also use western digital my >book and image for dos sees those fine and ai can restore from those. > >What is 1600 fsb? > >Never heard of driver genius. What does this do? UI couldn't use >your >trick on that dell as it was an on board card, sound and all on >the mother board. When you say cheap, any guess on how cheap for >a 3 gig dual core machine? > >It really ticks me off we don't have speech in safe mode or talking >installs. We should have had this stuff years ago!!! > >Later. >Butch If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. 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