Setting Yourself Up for Recovery with a Bit of Common Sense and RAID

You've heard the expression "Setting yourself up for disaster", well, this article will NOT help you do that. This is a follow-up to my article about backing up your system. I can't tell you how many times I've seen hard drives go out and people scramble to find their system disks. Frankly, loosing track of your system disks is just stupid. Especially the disks with the drivers. One trick I use is to make copies of them, put those copies in paper CD envelopes, open my CPU case, and tape them into the bottom of the case. This way, I'll always have them. And if I forget about them, I'll find them trying to figure out what went wrong. (please don't put tape directly on the CD ROMs themselves. Really now!) The next thing you should have is a text file that has every bit of information about your PC. It's a very easy thing to make, here's how: 1 -Click on: Start - Run 2- Type in msinfo32.exe and Click OK Button. 3- Wait for System Information window to come up. 4- Click on: File - Save, and name the file "Mysysteminfo" (file is called mysysteminfo.nfo) 5- Save it into "My Documents" or on your desktop. If you're doing this at work you can email this file to your computer support person and tell them please place this in your customer file in case of an emergency. You should also copy it to a floppy or burn it to a CD ROM. You can even print it out. Put the floppy in with those CDs you taped into the case of your CPU. (what? You didn't do that yet?) The next thing you want to make definitely sure of, is that you at LEAST have the following drivers for your PC: 1- Network Card Driver 2- Video Driver The reasoning here is that in the extremely likely event your hard disk fails, you will need your operating system disk and your NIC card drivers in order to get online and get the rest of your drivers. The importance of the video driver is that it's a giant pain in the ass downloading drivers in 640 x480 resolution with only 16 colors. The next thing I really recommend, especially with the size of hard disks these days, is mirroring your dives. If you order a new PC, it's not that much more money to order it with a hardware mirror or RAID. If you have an existing PC, you can figure out what hard disk you have, and order another one of the same drives. Then order an inexpensive RAID card from CDW or Tiger Direct. If you have a Dell under warranty, you can order it direct from Dell, and you won't void your warranty. I've seen the RAID cards on eBay for as low as 15 bucks. The Dell average is about $30. Also, don't get upset if you can't find EXACTLY THE SAME drive that ships with a given system. I've done raids with similar drives from the same manufacturer. As long as the specs on the drive are the same (heads, sectors, etc), you should be fine. I won't go into dirty details, but here's basically what you'll be getting into. You put in the raid card first, load your driver for it in windows, then shut down and plug both hard drives into the raid card. Your existing drive should be drive 0 (the first drive) the empty duplicate drive should be drive 1 (the second drive). When you boot, you will be presented with a RAID menu in the bios. Follow the directions carefully to construct your raid. It can take up to 3 hours with a 200 gig drive. When you finally build the raid and boot in windows, the card manufacturer will give you a windows utility to monitor RAID health...USE IT! In the event you're using an Adaptec card, the utility supplied on the CD usually doesn't work, and you'll wind up calling them and downloading a Java based one. Personally, I like the cards made by Silicon Image. They are cheap, and they work great, and their windows management software can be set up to email or SMS you in the even of a problem. One quick trick if you're pressed for time (don't make this a habit), let the raid build in DOS (before the windows boot) to about 10%, then hard reset the pc, let it boot into windows, and let the RAID recover there. The machine will be a bit sluggish till the RAID resyncs so try not to do anything major until the PC until the resync is done. Now...No excuses for losing your stuff...Get to work!