Mark Steyn: America should celebrate its independence

National Post of Canada ^ | July 5, 2002 | Mark Steyn

[summer]

bttt

[Gritty]

Terrific stuff from Steyn, as usual!

[lainde]

Ping for Steyn. Makes my day. Thank you Pokey!

[Brian Allen]

BUMP; PING; PING

[dennisw]

Ask someone to confirm this  ......

1. Make old hard drive the slave and copy over what you need from it. Copy the minimum you need. Do this in one session and get it all over with. 
2. Then to completely "cleanse" your old drive write zeros to it. Also known as low level reformat. Major manufacturers usually include this utility in their installation floppy disc and said disk is usually available for download too. I have done such reformats. Will take 2-3 hours if disc is 60 gigabytes.

[KeyWest]

Depends on what is wrong with the drive. Many HD manufacturers have diagnostic programs that will tell if the disk is bad or just sectors are bad and the disk can be used... but sectors going bad often means the drive is also heading south.

Also the manufacturers include 0 writing programs that totally clean a drive - including MBR- and copy programs to copy the complete drive to another. WD has them.

You can also use Fdisk to totally wipe a drive and start over.

If the drive is bad, check the warrantee. Over the past eight years I had two WD drives go on me and both were replaced.

An investment in a good backup program and CDRW drive was worth it. Recovered everything except two files which I was working on at the time one drive went bad. The other drive was a recall so lost nothing.

[MeekOneGOP]

Oh, besides the possible virus problem, the hard drive has 4 bad sectors too.
I need to copy the important files over and then get another hard drive for a
back up drive (slave drive). Thanks, FRiend. :O)

[dennisw]

Slave.... I get would 5400 rpm cheaper drive. Even for master I like them. Works good for me and they don't heat up the way the 7200RPM drives do.