OT: Hard disk mirror with Paragon on USB stick?

frys.com duh.

I do not buy there anymore. Have seen too many DOA cases and then it's a two-hour round trip drive.

you

way...

re-install,

That boils down to about the same effort as a complete re-install onto a new HD, plus Linux is quite nerdy, requires you to know the magic command line Swahili with which I am not familiar.

BTW, the old trick putting the drive (or in this case the whole laptop) on its side worked. It spun up one more time and I could get her bookmarks off of the machine. Not the latest address book data though because the sectors where that lives seem to be corrupt already.

up to less than half the rpm and stays there (pretty constantly). After an hour of warm-up a power cycle usually brings it to life at full rpm. Sound like it'll croak soon. No XP disks came with this machine, meaning I must mirror :-(

must have written DLLs to this PC's drive. Darn. Meaning it does not start off a USB stick. But it has to because the laptop will have to get off the ground with a completely empty new hard drive.

Jeorge, Just a question on your NC-10. How are the speakers, if any, on it? My wife might be needing a new machine soon, but she has to have decent sound. She's blind, you see, and does everything through a screen reader...

Charlie

Never tried it. I would remove the drive and mirror it with another machine. "dd" works nicely for this.

Chilis, coffee, and cacao for the vices to live by.

spools up to less than half the rpm and stays there (pretty constantly). After an hour of warm-up a power cycle usually brings it to life at full rpm. Sound like it'll croak soon. No XP disks came with this machine, meaning I must mirror :-(

must have written DLLs to this PC's drive. Darn. Meaning it does not start off a USB stick. But it has to because the laptop will have to get off the ground with a completely empty new hard drive.

Sorry to hear that. At least your wife has a tech-savvy husband who can find the best tools for her. Does she have a guide dog? (We sometimes help raising them)

I don't use my PCs for audio much, only CAD, writing specs and such so I don't know how audio should sound on a PC. Speech comes over quite well (just tried pastor's sermon). Also tried the country station WSM Online and it sounds ok. But as expected low frequencies don't sound too great considering the tiny speakers in there. Also not very loud so in a noisy environment this machine might not work for her.

I closed my eyes and tried to feel my way across the keyboard. The J has the usual bar. It can't be felt as pronounced as on other keyboards because the NC-10 keys are rounded in front. But I guess you could add some material there if needed so it becomes more recognizable. The machine is so small that I always felt its corners so that might be a good guidance as well.

The camera in the NC-10 is quite good, located right above the screen. I held a receipt in front of it and the result appears to be good enough for a decent OCR program to extract the information. Depends on the light situation, of course. Wish they had placed a could LEDs there.

There is also integrated Bluetooth. I cannot try that out because I don't have any Bluetooth devices (yet) but this could provide untethered audio tranfer to an ear set or head set.

Some things in its electronic manual are a bit strange. For example, it says there is a multi card slot but other than a plastic insert that won't come out I don't see anything there.

What convinced me to buy this netbook is the battery runtime. I have no idea what a spare would cost but it's been well over 4h now and the battery manager shows 45% remaining. It'll break the old Compaq Contura's 6h benchmark although that took the computer industry about

spools up to less than half the rpm and stays there (pretty constantly). After an hour of warm-up a power cycle usually brings it to life at full rpm. Sound like it'll croak soon. No XP disks came with this machine, meaning I must mirror :-(

it must have written DLLs to this PC's drive. Darn. Meaning it does not start off a USB stick. But it has to because the laptop will have to get off the ground with a completely empty new hard drive.

Sounds like it might work for her. She doesn't need it real loud, but needs fairly clean speech from the screen reader. She has small hands. so likes smaller keyboards. Doesn't need the camera, but might find a use for the bluetooth stuff...

Charlie

spools up to less than half the rpm and stays there (pretty constantly). After an hour of warm-up a power cycle usually brings it to life at full rpm. Sound like it'll croak soon. No XP disks came with this machine, meaning I must mirror :-(

it must have written DLLs to this PC's drive. Darn. Meaning it does not start off a USB stick. But it has to because the laptop will have to get off the ground with a completely empty new hard drive.

The audio is pretty crisp and easy to understand, certainly for something like books on tape (or on data in this case). Remember that this and most other netbooks do not have an internal CD/DVD drive. And I haven't figured out yet whether it has a multi-card slot and if so, how to open it.

The camera is standard. Could come in quite handy if you are gone and she wants you to take a quick look at something.

Another advantage of this netbook in comparison to other budget machines is the huge hard disk space. It has a 160GB drive which by default gets partionioned into two 80GB sections. You can't have that with silicon disks (yet). So your wife could store lots of stuff one there and then listen to it out in the backyard or somewhere away from the screen reader. From a nearly blind friend I remember those as rather big machines.

Bulloney. Linux distros support archival retrieval, and copying that volume to another will yield a perfect, functional, bootable copy. No re-installs required, no magic words. Linux installations are typically image copies for most applets and applications that get installed. Not much gets compiled during the installation runtime.

Yeah, to a Linux expert probably. But when I looked at an instruction on the web on how to do a mirror archive of a Windows machine using a Knoppix CD in order to dump that back onto a new hard drive that was at least two pages of intricate command line stuff.

Well, kind of expensive, but available.

You can do it in one line using e.g. ntfsclone. That's what I use to image laptops in their pristine state, before giving them to the user. The man page for ntfsclone gives the required command line for the most common scenarios (backup, restore, to/from a local file, and to/from the network.

Boot from a knoppix CD/DVD and choose from:

==================================================================

Clone NTFS on /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdc1:

ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/hdc1 /dev/hda1

Save an NTFS to a file in the special image format:

ntfsclone --save-image --output backup.img /dev/hda1

Restore an NTFS from a special image file to its original partition:

ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/hda1 backup.img

Save an NTFS into a compressed image file:

ntfsclone --save-image -o - /dev/hda1 | gzip -c > backup.img.gz

Restore an NTFS volume from a compressed image file:

gunzip -c backup.img.gz | \\\\ ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/hda1 -

Backup an NTFS volume to a remote host, using ssh. Please note, that ssh may ask for a password!

ntfsclone --save-image --output - /dev/hda1 | \\\\ gzip -c | ssh host ?cat > backup.img.gz?

Restore an NTFS volume from a remote host via ssh. Please note, that ssh may ask for a password!

ssh host ?cat backup.img.gz? | gunzip -c | \\\\ ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/hda1 -

==================================================================

Nowadays, the screen reader is pure software, since the speech synthesis software got good enough to be incorporated into the PC directly. But, she does appreciate long battery life. While she does most of her work at her desk, she does periodically take it out to remote site, like when she volunteered at the local chamber of commerce.

The large disc may really come in handy now. RFB&D has started producing downloadable books, which means she could just put them on the hard drive without needing a CDROM on USB.

Charlie

You just switched up!

You said a LINUX installation.

WHY are you now talking about a WINDOWS mirror session?

Let alone that booting up Knoppix DVD 5.3 and copying a hard drive never seemed like an 'intricate' command line session for me.

Note that most hard drives allow a full, bit-for-bit copy of an existing volume. You could do that, it would boot. Then re-size it to the desired size.

ask for a password!

ask for a password!

Thanks, John, that doesn't sound too difficult. I hope it allows to choose the password, else I'd be stuck. The other issue is whether the HD wakes up one more time. When I wanted to save one last bit of personal information (TB address book) it came back with some obscure "missing string" error.

In my origianl post, quote "No XP disks came with this machine, meaning I must mirror".

Yes, you are probably right, John has described the procedure. Looks like I have to mail-order a hard drive from Newegg or some other place. Came back from a client yesterday and stopped at three stores. Two of them had shut down (!). No dice.

That's more money than the whole laptop was, I could just buy a new computer for much less. Plus those are SATA, won't work in the ATA slot I guess.

Just a hint, for when she is using older PCs: I saw a 16GB SanDisk USB stick at Costco, AFAIR under $50. I'll go back there before the tax year ends and get one.