I finally got my new PC to communicate with my old PC, and spent a happy (though tedious) few hours copying most of my old C: drive to my new D: drive, ready for reformatting the old PC and re-furbishing it. Just as an experiment, after I'd turned off the old PC, I went to the folder where I'd copied P5. It's on a new drive on a new PC in a different sub-folder from where it was. I was expecting all sorts of trouble, but no! P5 just came up and ran (a bit faster than I'm used to). So I loaded one of my saved scenes and rendered it... Everything worked perfectly. My flabber was totally ghasted! Not only that but I also got confirmation today that my copies of P6 and Vue5 Infinite are on their way:-)) To even things out, tomorrow is going to be a bummer, I just know it.. Cheers, Diolma

It is nice to hear about something good happening for a change.

Rock on :) I had a 30 gig D slave hard drive die completely unexpectedly, and did lose some .pz3's and lots of poser installs 2 weeks ago. Not 3 days later, my 30 gig E slave drive of approximately the same age as the D drive showed a file system error on bootup. I ripped that thing outta the comp so fast it left a black streak in the air. Set it carefully on a shelf and went to the local PC Club and got a WD 160gig 8MB cache HD for $99.99 the next payday. After formatting the 160 gigger, I reinstalled the dying drive. I got lucky - it immediately was recognized by the bios, didnt go thru the file system check on bootup, and had enough life in it to properly transfer all 30 gigs of data (it had 3.1MB of freespace) to the new 160 gigger. Step 2 is to complete backing up everything thats on the new drive to remote CD media (wonders how much dvd burner and blanks cost.....) Pretty hectic overall, but on that E drive were some completely irreplacable videos of me playing onstage with my band at local bars. Everyone on this list would have heard a remote screaming from the west coast if id lost those! So, lurkers of this thread, whens the last time you (yes, YOU, I see all a youse huddled in the shadows over there) did a backup burn or considered the age of your current hard drives?

Words to live by, logansfury. A.R. is my name and A.R. is my game (you'll figure it out soon enough). I perform consistent backups of data (almost daily) and save all email (save the entire Outlook.pst file) , addresses (as CSV), and keep all software and upgrades. These are written to DVD when there is enough data (about every two to three months). On top of that, large data (videos, Poser Runtimes, large print images) are stored on external firewire harddrives. It only took one day many years ago ('88 maybe) to convince me of why backups are not only a good thing, but as necessary as eating and sleeping. :)

Isn't is great when stuff works. :-)

I am SO envious. I'm about to start backing up files so I can reformat my harddrive this weekend and (YAY!) get to subsequently load everything back on. I'm REALLY hoping that I can get to being productive again after that. :)

Miracles do happen in different ways. I had an old 800MB Western Digital in my machine where I worked die. I couldn't get it to work, the techs couldn't do anything so we replaced it and I put the thing on a shelf. A few years later when I left, I took it with me just for the heck. Later when I was running out of space on my system, I plugged the thing in and it worked and the original data was intact. I don't even remember if I reformatted but the drive's been working fine ever since. Maybe I'm just lucky but in 20+ years, starting with a 10MB that cost $500, I've only had one drive go well and truly bad - at least I think it's dead.

I, too, recently (well, somewhere in the last year) had a drive go bad on me. 1st time ever. At 1st I thought it was a virus. I was getting slow boot-up, had files go missing, hang-ups and all the other usual problems. Except, if I shut down the PC for a few hours, things seemed to improve.. But it wasn't a virus. One day, I happened to notice that the drive was running hot (and I mean "ouch!" hot). I suspect that a bearing had failed in the main spindle (just guessing..). Immediately went out, bought a new drive. Managed to salvage most (not all) of the original drive. Next time I start getting erratic behaviour, I'm going to check the temperature of the disc..:-)) Cheers, Diolma