HDD Crash

HB13DISH

It was my turn last week to get HDD problems.
It started with chkdsk starting on every boot and then giving error message that "unexpected error was encountered", opened Windows 2ooo pro without any problems.
Thanks to this early warning, I rushed and bought a portable HDD 250GB USB and backed up all my data, except applications and system.
Then ran setup with the hope that the formatting of the HDD would rectify the problem.

But after doing a short format, I got a message that the HDD is damaged.
Luckily I had a new 250GB SATA Seagate HDD, installed the Win2k pro on it and just when I thought my problems are over, I got an error message that the new HDD is BAD and that I should backup data and replace it.
The Seagate HDD is clicking noisily in an unbearable manner.

Now I am thinking that instead of wasting more money on buying another SATA HDD, perhaps I can use the 250GB Portable HDD to put there all the large size data and use a USB stick of either 4GB or 8GB to install the Windows 2000 Pro on it and then boot from the stick.
I am hoping that this methos might speed up the start and shutdown of the PC, but perhaps a USB interface would be much slower than IDE or SATA.

So before I rush tomorrow to buy the USB stick, I would like to know if:
1 - Has anybody tried to put complete Windows O/S on a USB stick?
2 - Should I format it in FAT32 or NTFS?
3 - Would the CD setup detects it and use that to install the S/W, or does it need to have an HDD (either IDE or SATA) for the installation?
4 - Can I install all the Program Files on the portable HDD, or does it have to be on the USB stick (where the o/s files are)?

My PC BIOS supports booting from USB, but never tried it yet.
Thanks for any replies till tomorrow morning.

Topper

It is certainly an interesting idea but I am not sure windows will like it, I have a laptop I boot up into linux with a stick but cannot say I have ever had the time to mess with W2K booting from a stick. Let us know what you achieve either way.

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Turok

hm,with seagate hds i never had any problems,thats the best brand i would say!
for daly use,old maxtors are very hot and loud and crashes often!
use partion magic to save all the sectors to another hd,maybe only windows does not see it,and partion magic give you the psoiblity to see some data,
but when acces is imposible,then only profesional data experts can help,and this is very expensice!

search on google for the programm" acronis"this is also like partion magic!
most bad hds was the old dlta series form ibm,4 or 5 crashes in one year,that was a real horror that noice..

dig deep

Booting from an USB looks like a good idea

and the stick must be faster than the HDD so I think it is well worth a test

compufunk

I've never done it, but it can be done. Although, its a bit messy IMO, and Windowz is likely to complain a lot about it.

I doubt if the Windowz installation disk will let you install anywhere except on an internal IDE/ATA drive.

To get around this, have a look at Barts PE, I've used it in the past to build a live CD which booted into Win XP. You may be able to modify the procedure to get it to work with a USB flash drive.

Irongeek has written a guide on building a live XP CD using Barts PE, this may give you some hints on getting it done.

_http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/pebuildertutorial
Its an excelent site by the way, he's got lots of great info there

For some reason those drives mostly only support FAT32 in my experience.
I'm not sure on that one, It should be fine in most cases.

I can confirm that most applications will happily work on a partition other than the one where OS is installed.

I will be watching with interest

HB13DISH

Thank you all for your input.
Went out shopping this morning and bought a USB flash 8GB and knowing in my heart that this is not going to work smoothly, I also bought a Samsung SATA HDD.
Disconnected the Seagate HDD, from BIOS had the correct boot sequence, inserted the installation CD, but it didn't recognize the USB Stick.
(Although from the BIOS I chose it as Hard Disk).
Next I used FDISK from an old DOS installation, defined the partition, but still the CD setup would not recognize it.
Next, reconnected the Seagate HDD, installed Acronis TrueImage 11, cloned the C:\ to the USB flash, disabled the Seagate and rebooted.
Then I saw the USB flash LED flicker and the Windows 2K started to load the O/S. Noticed that the speed is markedly slower than with the SATA HDD and then it crashed.
So the buttom line at the moment is that it didn't work.
Might try Compufunk suggestions some other time. Very useful indeed. Thanks mate.

dig deep

Sorry to hear that mate

Could it depend of a not-so-good usb ? Cheap ?

Anyway, I must try this as well, I think I saw (somewhere) that there is a small winXP version only need 2 MB or less I will find that and try it out.

I´ll report back

compufunk

Sorry to hear it didnt work out for you, You must be out of pocket a bit after purchasing all that hardware
How old is the computer? If its not USB 2.0 then I can see why it would be slow. High Speed USB 2.0 is 10s of times faster.

Let us know if you try Barts PE, I might have a go at it myself if I can find the time.

HB13DISH

Thanks. I had to do this test for my own experience.
The USB flash is from the best manufacturer SanDisk.
Yes, WinXP might be better. Look forward to your report.

HB13DISH

Thanks compufunk.
Yes it did cost a bit, but I needed the USB 8GB anyway to use on my Dreambox 7000s in order to record instead of the HDD.
The PC has USB 2.0 support, so this is not the problem.
Looks like I made a mistake buying 320GB instead of 160GB.
The difference in price was not that much but later on I ran into large size issues with the Samsung HDD.
Used FDISK to create a partition, then with the Win2K setup CD I managed to see that it recognized the whole capacity.
Selected the partion and it started to farmat and installed the software.
When it finished, I noticed that it didn't work as usual and it just restarted the setup, showing me that there now 4 partitions with different sizes.
Obviously this was not acceptable, so I tried FDISK again but now it hangs and wouldn't do anything.
In short, I am stuck.
Looks like more money to spend on a new 160GB HDD tomorrow, unless I get this thing to work.
I read that I need Win2K with SP3 on it in order to recognize a larger than 137GB HDD, but my CD has only SP2 and I need to add the SP3 to it and then hopefully I can get some positive results.
Will try to do this with Autostreamer in order to incorporate the SP3 to the Win2K setup.
Or look for a utility from the Samsung website.
Has anybody got experience with large size HDD under Win2K?

compufunk

Thats a new one on me, I was under the impression that 2Tb was the limit for NTFS.

I would start over. There is no need to us FDISK that I can think of. The Win2K installation program can create/edit partitions.

I would delete all partitions using the Win2K installation program, then start creating whatever partitions are needed from there.

HB13DISH

As mentioned before, SP2 has a limit of 137GB.
With WIN2K SP3 this limitation was removed.
But as my original installation CD had only SP2, I need to integrate the SP3 or SP4 into it using something like Autostreamer.
Wish me luck.

HB13DISH

Just a little update.
Autostreamer with SP4 included in the Win2K CD didn't help recognizing the 320GB HDD full size, only as 137GB.
I bought another HDD with 160GB and still the Win2K CD would only try to format and install the s/w into a 137GB partition, so I used the good old FDISK to partition it under DOS and this time I managed to get the whole size 160GB shown and went ahead with the setup.
So this little DOS utility was a great help, at least for 160GB and 250GB but not 320GB.
By the way, 3.5" IDE disks are hard to find in shops nowadays and I believe that they will soon be extinct. So if your motherboard doesn't have SATA support, then consider buying a replacement IDE disk NOW just in case, or replce the MB with a new one when the time comes.
The smaller 2.5" IDE might live a little bit longer.
This applies also to receivers like 7000S or 7020S that has only IDE interface.

compufunk

Glad to here you got sorted in the end a few disks later.

HB13DISH

Thanks compufunk.
I am actually glad the HDD crashed as this has given me the chance to clean up all my applications and to use only what I really need.
After installing all the applications, the HDD has used only about 6GB and the W2K installation was only 1.6GB.
Which brings me back to the idea of using 8GB USB flash and how great this could have been if it had worked.
What I don't understand is why HDD manufacturers don't incorporate a 2GB or 4GB flash IC on the HDD itself specifically for the installation of the O/S files and use that in order to speed up the start and shutdown of the O/S and perhaps also speed up the opening and using various applications.
Wouldn't this be faster than to rely only on the mechanical action of the disk?
I must look into SSD when I have some free time or if somebody has already used it what is their impression?