My worst nightmare came true this morning. Yesterday, after spending the "magic hour" filming my one year old driving her battery powered car that her grandfather bought for her birthday, I got busy editing... about 2:00am, I finally had a nice little video to send all the family... So I start rendering and go to bed...
8:30 am, excited to see the final results, I head to the screen to find white text on a black background reading " blah blah attempt recovery by choosing 'r' after re-boot" something or another...
I have not been the same since. Attempts to "recover" have failed miserably. I can't even load up XP (multimedia edition) on a fresh hard drive (WD-500GB EIDE), so I'm pretty convinced that the drive and data is still in fair shape, just something has croaked in the system itself; there was some SERIOUS buss traffic going on.
SO now all I can think of is RAID. I've been wanting a laptop, so I'll get one for the menial crap, but I've got several good EIDE high-cap drives and might as well use them.
Does anyone have any comments they'd like to share? It seems that my computing tasks have shifted primarily to Visual Studio; ASP web-work, and video editing. (I've never been a gamer). I don't EVER want to be "dead in the water" again. I can probably justify about $20 on this project (yes, that was sarcasm, but only a little bit....). Oh yeah, it also holds of my business files too.
Anyone with any home-brew computer they want to brag about, which might help us all build better systems? (I personally have been running a Micro Center P4 w/1GB 2700 ram, a Seagate 200GB and WD80GB, Sapphire video card and SB Audigy 24bit all controlled by XP multimedia (...pro) yeah, the MB/processor is DATED ('02 era probably), but it has served me well... my previous box was a dx2-66 running NT4.0
Dan
Computer Building discussion
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dmstockt
- Posts: 14
- Joined: Fri Jun 16, 2006 5:07 pm
- Location: SE Michigan
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sjj1805
- Posts: 14383
- Joined: Wed Jan 26, 2005 7:20 am
- System_Drive: C
- 32bit or 64bit: 32 Bit
- motherboard: Equium P200-178
- processor: Intel Pentium Dual-Core Processor T2080
- ram: 2 GB
- Video Card: Intel 945 Express
- sound_card: Intel GMA 950
- Hard_Drive_Capacity: 1160 GB
- Location: Birmingham UK
You have been wanting a laptop - yes these are now as good and as powerful as desktops - but obviously more portable.
Drawbacks with a laptop compared to a desktop are that for the average user you can't easily take them apart and swap parts like hard drives, graphics cards and so on. If they break (mechanically) it is usually a trip to a repair shop. with a desktop you can fix things yourself.
You have a collection of IDE hard drives that obvioulsy you don't want to go to waste. so what can be done?
One possible answer is to get that laptop you've been wanting - if you get a new desktop you will still have that hankering feeling for a laptop.
Now for those hard drives, it is possible to pop along to a computer superstore - or even shop off the internet - and get some external USB/Firewire hard drive enclosures. What these do is turn that big collection of IDE hard drives into portable external drives. They fit inside the enclosures and then connect to the computer (laptop/desktop) by way of either a USB or Firewire cable. Some have both options available.
The drives now become portable so you can use them not just for extra storage but also to transfer large amounts of stuff from one computer to another.
Drawbacks with a laptop compared to a desktop are that for the average user you can't easily take them apart and swap parts like hard drives, graphics cards and so on. If they break (mechanically) it is usually a trip to a repair shop. with a desktop you can fix things yourself.
You have a collection of IDE hard drives that obvioulsy you don't want to go to waste. so what can be done?
One possible answer is to get that laptop you've been wanting - if you get a new desktop you will still have that hankering feeling for a laptop.
Now for those hard drives, it is possible to pop along to a computer superstore - or even shop off the internet - and get some external USB/Firewire hard drive enclosures. What these do is turn that big collection of IDE hard drives into portable external drives. They fit inside the enclosures and then connect to the computer (laptop/desktop) by way of either a USB or Firewire cable. Some have both options available.
The drives now become portable so you can use them not just for extra storage but also to transfer large amounts of stuff from one computer to another.