NEW issues

My system drive for Windows XP on my new computer (old hard drive) died earlier this week. I've been working on it here and there as I get time trying to resurrect the drive so I didn't have to reinstall everything from scratch. I had a feeling it was a partition table issue from past problems with this drive so I bought a program from a company called Easeus that was supposed to repair Master Boot Records, Partition Tables, and Boot Sectors. After several attempts, I could not get it to come back to life. I did a 'surface test' and discovered it did indeed have some bad sectors so I counted it a loss and started over from scratch.

I didn't lose any of my important data since I use a program called GoodSync to backup all my important stuff on other drives. I'm getting pretty good and fast at installing Windows XP and all my programs in the right order...I've done it a lot the past several months. I am now down to the last batch of programs to install and activate (Adobe CS3 Production Studio) then I'll use a utility that came with my motherboard to backup my entire system drive. It's supped to back up the entire drive in a way that will make it easily recoverable in the event of catastrophic system failure....except if your drive physically goes bad.

One of the things I've been looking into is setting up a RAID1 (mirrored volume) for all my data (not programs or operating system). However, I've learned that you can't do that on Windows XP. So I'm again using GoodSync to back up one of my data drives to another identical drive so in the event of one drive failing, I'll have a backup immediately available. It takes a little more work to do it this way, but since I can't do a RAID1, this will have to do.

That's all for now. The computer has been running very well until this recent drive failure and I am very happy with my purchase and computer building success. I've been seeing some increased performance with games when plying using the Windows Vista operating system...I'll talk about that next time.