Re: off-topic: scheduled backup to external hard drive

[Norman Bauman nbauman@xxxxxxxx]

At 07:07 PM 4/5/06 -0400, Harry Binswanger wrote:
>
>> >Because for each backup, you have to put on the cables, then take them off
>> >when you're done (rebooting in between, of course), and you don't want to
>> >have to open the case to do that.
>>
>>Why disconnect the cables?
>
>For safety. Some viruses do things to all the drives they find on your
>system, so it's safer to keep the backup drive off the system except for
>when you're backing up onto them.

That did occur to me, and I thought, "Nah, they wouldn't do that!" But even
if they did, I don't think they could get into a Ghost image file. But OK
-- I agree, for maximum security you should have the drive disconnected. If
I were going to do that, I'd use a mobile rack, as some people on this list
recommended. I saw them for about $30 at CompUSA, and $15 for an internal
internal tray.

>>Before you plug or unplug the ribbon cable and power cable, you have to
>>turn the power off. According to Murphy's Law, you will eventually forget
>>to turn the power off.

>I'm merely suggesting that
>it doesn't fry anything--or not in my experience. After I wrote this,
>however, I see that you had sparks once, which surprises me.

As I reconstructed the accident, I was inserting the power plug at an
angle, and one of the live connectors must have hit a ground. The power
supply was dead. Unfortunately, it was a Hewlett-Packard small format case,
so I couldn't use a standard CompUSA power supply. I opened the power
supply up (not recommended) to see if there was a blown fuse, but there
wasn't. The funny thing was -- I ordered a new power supply, prepared to
install it, turned on the power one last time to check it out, and the dead
power supply was alive again.

The hard drive was also dead. I got it back with FDISK, but I could no
longer make a partition with PartitionMagic, but instead got PM error
messages. Otherwise, the drive works.

>The good news is that
>the *power* cable is "keyed" so that it is impossible to plug it in
>backwards. (In fact, in recent years, even the data cable has been so
>keyed, or usually so.)

According to Mueller's book, Upgrading and Repairing PCs, Dell once had a
proprietary motherboard and power supply with the cabling changed such
that, even though they claimed to meet a standard form factor, if you used
a different power supply it would fry the motherboard, and if you used a
different motherboard the power supply would fry the motherboard. Muller
got some lame explanation from Dell. I would be reluctant to buy a Dell
after that.

Norman

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Norman Bauman
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