[or-roots] New computer

[Leslie Chapman]

I think we may be missing David's point by jumping to the confusion that
seems implied that partitions cause hard drive failure, I don't think that
is what he meant, just that if you have a "physical" hard drive failure that
is physical in nature and you have all of your valuable relatives on the
"nice safe data partition" and you don't want to spend the money to have
someone get that data off your drive or for some reason the failure was so
intense it simply can't be recovered, then two hard drives IS the best bet,
but as pointed out earlier a CD burner and saving regularly to CD and
sending them offsite is a much more secure method of saving your data. I
have been thinkking about putting a backup in my bank vault, of course I
need a DVD burner to get everything on one disk now, but I think I won't try
that excuse to get it past the boss as she thinks little enough of my
obsession with the dead relatives as it is. Anyway if you shop around and
watch for a good rebated you can score a lowend CD burner for less than $50
dollars and often substantially less and CD's are now cheaper than floppy
disks if you aren't after real high end CD's.

The advantage of partitioned drives is that you can reformat your C drive
and still save the data in your D or whatever drive, I used to do that
occasionally with my old Crapaq PII before I figured out what the problem
was. Actually, I think I couldn't reformat it, but I could wipe it clean and
reinstall my op system which I had to do on a regular basis.

As Walt says there is no physical reason not to partition your hard drive,
it might be a psychological or "level of competence" problem, but not
physical. And as to viruses and worms etc, yes many of them can get to any
hard drive they are connected to, be it network or mirrored drive or
partitioned drive, the only sure protection from them is not to go online,
never hook your computer up to a phone line and never put any disk in your
computer that wasn't created on your computer. Unfortunately that makes it
difficult to come in here and be abused by us, or to use any software that
didn't come with your computer. The other option is a virus protection
software, I swear by (mostly but occasionally "at") Norton but am pretty
sure McCaffey is as good or nearly so as I have nerd relatives that use it
and won't touch Norton. I have it set up to automatically update itself now,
or I guess I should say that Norton took it upon itself to do so and since
it has saved me a couple of times from new stuff I hadn't even heard of I am
leaving it that way.

Les C


-----Original Message-----
From: or-roots-admin at sosinet.sos.state.or.us
[mailto:or-roots-admin at sosinet.sos.state.or.us]On Behalf Of
DAVIESW739 at aol.com
Sent: Friday, December 19, 2003 9:47 AM
To: or-roots at sosinet.sos.state.or.us
Subject: Re: [or-roots] New computer


i have been using hardrive partitions for years and have never had a problem
with them. I don't know where some people come up with this off the wall
stuff. Its an old wives tales David. I use Windows XP and it auto maticcally
partition the drive so does Win 98, and ME.

Walt Davies
Cooper Hollow Farm
Monmouth, OR 97361
503 623-0460