OT: Hard disk mirror with Paragon on USB stick?

[Joerg]

Jeorge,
Just a question on your NC-10. How are the speakers, if any, on it?
My wife might be needing a new machine soon, but she has to have
decent sound. She's blind, you see, and does everything through a
screen reader...

Sorry to hear that. At least your wife has a tech-savvy husband who can
find the best tools for her. Does she have a guide dog? (We sometimes
help raising them)

I don't use my PCs for audio much, only CAD, writing specs and such so I
don't know how audio should sound on a PC. Speech comes over quite well
(just tried pastor's sermon). Also tried the country station WSM Online
and it sounds ok. But as expected low frequencies don't sound too great
considering the tiny speakers in there. Also not very loud so in a noisy
environment this machine might not work for her.

I closed my eyes and tried to feel my way across the keyboard. The J has
the usual bar. It can't be felt as pronounced as on other keyboards
because the NC-10 keys are rounded in front. But I guess you could add
some material there if needed so it becomes more recognizable. The
machine is so small that I always felt its corners so that might be a
good guidance as well.

The camera in the NC-10 is quite good, located right above the screen. I
held a receipt in front of it and the result appears to be good enough
for a decent OCR program to extract the information. Depends on the
light situation, of course. Wish they had placed a could LEDs there.

There is also integrated Bluetooth. I cannot try that out because I
don't have any Bluetooth devices (yet) but this could provide untethered
audio tranfer to an ear set or head set.

Some things in its electronic manual are a bit strange. For example, it
says there is a multi card slot but other than a plastic insert that
won't come out I don't see anything there.

What convinced me to buy this netbook is the battery runtime. I have no
idea what a spare would cost but it's been well over 4h now and the
battery manager shows 45% remaining. It'll break the old Compaq
Contura's 6h benchmark although that took the computer industry about
1.5 decades.

 

[Charlie E.]

Sorry to hear that. At least your wife has a tech-savvy husband who can
find the best tools for her. Does she have a guide dog? (We sometimes
help raising them)

I don't use my PCs for audio much, only CAD, writing specs and such so I
don't know how audio should sound on a PC. Speech comes over quite well
(just tried pastor's sermon). Also tried the country station WSM Online
and it sounds ok. But as expected low frequencies don't sound too great
considering the tiny speakers in there. Also not very loud so in a noisy
environment this machine might not work for her.

I closed my eyes and tried to feel my way across the keyboard. The J has
the usual bar. It can't be felt as pronounced as on other keyboards
because the NC-10 keys are rounded in front. But I guess you could add
some material there if needed so it becomes more recognizable. The
machine is so small that I always felt its corners so that might be a
good guidance as well.

The camera in the NC-10 is quite good, located right above the screen. I
held a receipt in front of it and the result appears to be good enough
for a decent OCR program to extract the information. Depends on the
light situation, of course. Wish they had placed a could LEDs there.

There is also integrated Bluetooth. I cannot try that out because I
don't have any Bluetooth devices (yet) but this could provide untethered
audio tranfer to an ear set or head set.

Some things in its electronic manual are a bit strange. For example, it
says there is a multi card slot but other than a plastic insert that
won't come out I don't see anything there.

What convinced me to buy this netbook is the battery runtime. I have no
idea what a spare would cost but it's been well over 4h now and the
battery manager shows 45% remaining. It'll break the old Compaq
Contura's 6h benchmark although that took the computer industry about
1.5 decades.

Sounds like it might work for her. She doesn't need it real loud, but
needs fairly clean speech from the screen reader. She has small
hands. so likes smaller keyboards. Doesn't need the camera, but might
find a use for the bluetooth stuff...

Charlie

 

[Joerg]

Sounds like it might work for her. She doesn't need it real loud, but
needs fairly clean speech from the screen reader. She has small
hands. so likes smaller keyboards. Doesn't need the camera, but might
find a use for the bluetooth stuff...

The audio is pretty crisp and easy to understand, certainly for
something like books on tape (or on data in this case). Remember that
this and most other netbooks do not have an internal CD/DVD drive. And I
haven't figured out yet whether it has a multi-card slot and if so, how
to open it.

The camera is standard. Could come in quite handy if you are gone and
she wants you to take a quick look at something.

Another advantage of this netbook in comparison to other budget machines
is the huge hard disk space. It has a 160GB drive which by default gets
partionioned into two 80GB sections. You can't have that with silicon
disks (yet). So your wife could store lots of stuff one there and then
listen to it out in the backyard or somewhere away from the screen
reader. From a nearly blind friend I remember those as rather big machines.

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

That boils down to about the same effort as a complete re-install onto a
new HD, plus Linux is quite nerdy, requires you to know the magic
command line Swahili with which I am not familiar.

Bulloney. Linux distros support archival retrieval, and copying that
volume to another will yield a perfect, functional, bootable copy. No
re-installs required, no magic words. Linux installations are typically
image copies for most applets and applications that get installed. Not
much gets compiled during the installation runtime.

 

[Joerg]

Bulloney. Linux distros support archival retrieval, and copying that
volume to another will yield a perfect, functional, bootable copy. No
re-installs required, no magic words. Linux installations are typically
image copies for most applets and applications that get installed. Not
much gets compiled during the installation runtime.

Yeah, to a Linux expert probably. But when I looked at an instruction on
the web on how to do a mirror archive of a Windows machine using a
Knoppix CD in order to dump that back onto a new hard drive that was at
least two pages of intricate command line stuff.

 

[Jasen Betts]

Another advantage of this netbook in comparison to other budget machines
is the huge hard disk space. It has a 160GB drive which by default gets
partionioned into two 80GB sections. You can't have that with silicon
disks (yet).

http://alrightdeals.com/Item.htm?Id=S1_Hard.Drives_Solid.Static.Hard.Drive___78426

Well, kind of expensive, but available.

 

[John Devereux]

Yeah, to a Linux expert probably. But when I looked at an instruction
on the web on how to do a mirror archive of a Windows machine using a
Knoppix CD in order to dump that back onto a new hard drive that was
at least two pages of intricate command line stuff.

You can do it in one line using e.g. ntfsclone. That's what I use to
image laptops in their pristine state, before giving them to the
user. The man page for ntfsclone gives the required command line for
the most common scenarios (backup, restore, to/from a local file, and
to/from the network.

Boot from a knoppix CD/DVD and choose from:

==================================================================

Clone NTFS on /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdc1:

ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/hdc1 /dev/hda1

Save an NTFS to a file in the special image format:

ntfsclone --save-image --output backup.img /dev/hda1

Restore an NTFS from a special image file to its original partition:

ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/hda1 backup.img

Save an NTFS into a compressed image file:

ntfsclone --save-image -o - /dev/hda1 | gzip -c > backup.img.gz

Restore an NTFS volume from a compressed image file:

gunzip -c backup.img.gz | \\
ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/hda1 -

Backup an NTFS volume to a remote host, using ssh. Please note, that ssh may ask for a password!

ntfsclone --save-image --output - /dev/hda1 | \\
gzip -c | ssh host ’cat > backup.img.gz’

Restore an NTFS volume from a remote host via ssh. Please note, that ssh may ask for a password!

ssh host ’cat backup.img.gz’ | gunzip -c | \\
ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/hda1 -

==================================================================

 

[Charlie E.]

The audio is pretty crisp and easy to understand, certainly for
something like books on tape (or on data in this case). Remember that
this and most other netbooks do not have an internal CD/DVD drive. And I
haven't figured out yet whether it has a multi-card slot and if so, how
to open it.

The camera is standard. Could come in quite handy if you are gone and
she wants you to take a quick look at something.

Another advantage of this netbook in comparison to other budget machines
is the huge hard disk space. It has a 160GB drive which by default gets
partionioned into two 80GB sections. You can't have that with silicon
disks (yet). So your wife could store lots of stuff one there and then
listen to it out in the backyard or somewhere away from the screen
reader. From a nearly blind friend I remember those as rather big machines.

Nowadays, the screen reader is pure software, since the speech
synthesis software got good enough to be incorporated into the PC
directly. But, she does appreciate long battery life. While she does
most of her work at her desk, she does periodically take it out to
remote site, like when she volunteered at the local chamber of
commerce.

The large disc may really come in handy now. RFB&D has started
producing downloadable books, which means she could just put them on
the hard drive without needing a CDROM on USB.

Charlie

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

Yeah, to a Linux expert probably. But when I looked at an instruction on
the web on how to do a mirror archive of a Windows machine using a
Knoppix CD in order to dump that back onto a new hard drive that was at
least two pages of intricate command line stuff.

You just switched up!

You said a LINUX installation.

WHY are you now talking about a WINDOWS mirror session?

Let alone that booting up Knoppix DVD 5.3 and copying a hard drive
never seemed like an 'intricate' command line session for me.

Note that most hard drives allow a full, bit-for-bit copy of an
existing volume. You could do that, it would boot. Then re-size it to
the desired size.

 

[Joerg]

You can do it in one line using e.g. ntfsclone. That's what I use to
image laptops in their pristine state, before giving them to the
user. The man page for ntfsclone gives the required command line for
the most common scenarios (backup, restore, to/from a local file, and
to/from the network.

Boot from a knoppix CD/DVD and choose from:

==================================================================

Clone NTFS on /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdc1:

ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/hdc1 /dev/hda1

Save an NTFS to a file in the special image format:

ntfsclone --save-image --output backup.img /dev/hda1

Restore an NTFS from a special image file to its original partition:

ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/hda1 backup.img

Save an NTFS into a compressed image file:

ntfsclone --save-image -o - /dev/hda1 | gzip -c > backup.img.gz

Restore an NTFS volume from a compressed image file:

gunzip -c backup.img.gz | \\
ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/hda1 -

Backup an NTFS volume to a remote host, using ssh. Please note, that ssh may ask for a password!

ntfsclone --save-image --output - /dev/hda1 | \\
gzip -c | ssh host ’cat > backup.img.gz’

Restore an NTFS volume from a remote host via ssh. Please note, that ssh may ask for a password!

ssh host ’cat backup.img.gz’ | gunzip -c | \\
ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/hda1 -

==================================================================

Thanks, John, that doesn't sound too difficult. I hope it allows to
choose the password, else I'd be stuck. The other issue is whether the
HD wakes up one more time. When I wanted to save one last bit of
personal information (TB address book) it came back with some obscure
"missing string" error.

 

[Joerg]

You just switched up!

You said a LINUX installation.

WHY are you now talking about a WINDOWS mirror session?

In my origianl post, quote "No XP disks came with this machine, meaning
I must mirror".

Let alone that booting up Knoppix DVD 5.3 and copying a hard drive
never seemed like an 'intricate' command line session for me.

Note that most hard drives allow a full, bit-for-bit copy of an
existing volume. You could do that, it would boot. Then re-size it to
the desired size.

Yes, you are probably right, John has described the procedure. Looks
like I have to mail-order a hard drive from Newegg or some other place.
Came back from a client yesterday and stopped at three stores. Two of
them had shut down (!). No dice.

 

[Joerg]

http://alrightdeals.com/Item.htm?Id=S1_Hard.Drives_Solid.Static.Hard.Drive___78426

Well, kind of expensive, but available.

That's more money than the whole laptop was, I could just buy a new
computer for much less. Plus those are SATA, won't work in the ATA slot
I guess.

 

[Joerg]

Nowadays, the screen reader is pure software, since the speech
synthesis software got good enough to be incorporated into the PC
directly. But, she does appreciate long battery life. While she does
most of her work at her desk, she does periodically take it out to
remote site, like when she volunteered at the local chamber of
commerce.

The large disc may really come in handy now. RFB&D has started
producing downloadable books, which means she could just put them on
the hard drive without needing a CDROM on USB.

Just a hint, for when she is using older PCs: I saw a 16GB SanDisk USB
stick at Costco, AFAIR under $50. I'll go back there before the tax year
ends and get one.

 

[Joerg]

Are you sure there isn't a "system restore" CD or something with words
to that effect that includes a custom version of Doze that will only
work with that brand / model of portable PC and is preconfigured?
(NB it may not show any obvious MS markings even for main brands)

All sorts of disks but each one only says "this, that and the other driver.

If you have a valid activation code for XP registered to this machine
you should in principle at least be able to reinstall from any XP CD
with the usual pain and suffering of installing FP1, FP2 and FP3 too.

Yep, got the code. A couple days ago I tried to start the laptop with
the HD taken out. It got stuck in some BIOS routine, never asked for any
function key entries. I wonder if that's normal.

Wise to do the first two offline, a pre FP1 version of XP would not last
long enough on the internet these days before it was harvested by a botnet.

I never, ever go online when installing anything. Way too dangerous,
plus I don't like any software to "call home".

It ought to work provided that you booted from the USB stick or CD.
Otherwise all sorts of registry settings will end up in the machine
registry of the OS that booted the system. The days when you could copy
a program onto removable media and expect it to run are long gone.

Yes :-(

I had to plug in the USB stick and do a regular uninstall. Pathetic. Why
can't they keep it simple?

If you count your time into the equation the quickest cheapest solution
is buy a suitably big external HD and mirror the old portable drive onto
it with Paragon already installed on the portable. Make the external HD
the primary boot media to check it and then remove and replace the half
dead drive. Mirror it back and you are done - at least in theory.

If the USB drive is big enough you could do the same with that but 64GB
thumbnail drives are still a bit pricy so it's more expensive.

Costco has a 16GB USB stick for under $50. That ought to do it.

And even then it may still be more cost effective to buy a new portable.
The cute 10" micro laptops are going for about £250 here for Xmas, and
their bigger cousins for about £100 more for a decent specimen.

True, but I don't like to foster a "throw-away society".

 

[John Devereux]

Joerg <[email protected]> writes:

[...]

You can do it in one line using e.g. ntfsclone. That's what I use to
image laptops in their pristine state, before giving them to the
user. The man page for ntfsclone gives the required command line for
the most common scenarios (backup, restore, to/from a local file, and
to/from the network.

[...]
Thanks, John, that doesn't sound too difficult. I hope it allows to
choose the password, else I'd be stuck.

The password is only used when you want to backup to a remote machine
via the network, using the ssh protocol. You would also need that
remote machine, with a suitable ssh server (like many linux boxes have
for remote admin). This scenario is what these command line versions
address:

What it is doing is setting up a "pipeline" so that data goes:

ntfsclone <-> gzip <-> ssh client <-> network <-> ssh server <-> remote file

But for it to work you have to have the remote machine setup right too
(e.g. with linux, with the ssh daemon running).

But if at all possible I suggest you hook up two drives in parallel,
and just copy from one to the other, since it sounds like you would
find it easier to configure this. Then you would use the command line:

Of course you had better be sure which one is hdc1 and which one is
hda1.

Not of this is particularly difficult if you are familiar with linux,
but could be a time waster if you are not i'm afraid.

The other issue is whether the HD wakes up one more time. When I
wanted to save one last bit of personal information (TB address
book) it came back with some obscure "missing string" error.

I'm not sure how well ntfsclone copes with filesystem errors. I have
only used it on intact filesystems, to image a working, setup system
for later recovery. There are other more basic commands which can
literally "clone" a hard disk, errors and all, such as dd.

 

[Archimedes' Lever]

In my origianl post, quote "No XP disks came with this machine, meaning
I must mirror".




Yes, you are probably right, John has described the procedure. Looks
like I have to mail-order a hard drive from Newegg or some other place.
Came back from a client yesterday and stopped at three stores. Two of
them had shut down (!). No dice.

You have no "Office Depot" stores?

 

[Charmed Snark]

Joel Koltner expounded in

Hi Joerg,



If there wasn't a recovery CD, there's a good chance that either...

1) There's a recovery partition, and pressing some magical key
combination like Ctrl+F11 at boot (this is what older Dells used)
activates it. ...or...

Or in some cases it simply shows up as D: , just big enough
for the recovery software on it.

 

[Charmed Snark]

Jim Thompson expounded in

...
There's an old wives tale that says refrigerate the drive for awhile.
Then it should spin up long enough to extract a back-up.

If you have the HD out of the laptop, I've also had
some luck with careful but sharp raps with a hammer
to the frame (not the PCB).

Use that only when you have nothing else to lose.

I haven't tried it... I've always been lucky and heard the bearing
noise early enough to get a back-up ;-)

At least you didn't do the PhD thing: I read about
some professor that decided to spray WD-40 (oil)
into his laptop because the HD was making squeaking
noises. Then he was surprised when the laptop failed
to reboot.

Now there's that PhD education at work!

Snark.

 

[Joerg]

You have no "Office Depot" stores?

I went there on Tuesday. It has become an empty parking lot :-(

 

[Joerg]

[...]

I went there on Tuesday. It has become an empty parking lot :-(

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1296418/kb_toys_bankruptcy_drives_store_closings.html

near the bottom of the page.

Yep :-(

And that won't be the end of the saga. The lil' PC assembler across the
street from a client was the other place I stopped by Tuesday night.
Gone as well. There is some kind of furniture dealer in there now ...

We have large stores going out of business left and right here. Yet
there are some really stupid developments going on, like a brand new
gigantic mall in Folsom, close to Intel. It just does not make any sense
to me at all.

Oh, and now the dems here try to skirt voter decisions again. Through
some shenanigans they try to dodge the 2/3 majority rule and want to
impose major tax hikes. Like a 3% source withholding from contractors
(like me). That is IMHO highly illegal because you can't tax gross
income if you don't know how much the guy spent on materials. I hope
that stuff suffocates in the courts. Else this will drive biz out of
California. Guess it's time to crack out the Places Rated book again.