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Mouse Troubleshooting
step 1: Swear at mouse bitterly...Reboot computer. If the problem is not solved move to the next step in the troubleshooting matrix...
step 2: Threaten mouse with a hard object...
step 3: Slap mouse around while swearing bitterly...
step 4: Execute step 3 while pounding mouse on computer desk...
step 5: Smash mouse into 1.5 million pieces with a hard object (stapler or 3 hole punch) while swearing bitterly...Get car keys out of pocket...
step 6: Go to Wal Mart. Replace mouse...VIOLA problem solved...LOL
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Brian, thanks for the comments on backing up with more than just an external hard drive. Short Story - we bought a new computer, gave the old one to daughter. I think that she was 11 at the time. No internet connection on the machine so it was safe. She wanted to play games on it and do her home work. The small drive was very full and she wanted to load some games. I told her that she could load the games after I retrieved my stuff off of the computer, but she couldn't wait and reformatted the hard drive before I retrieved my info off of the hard drive. All digital photos, fishing logs, tax information - it was all gone. She was hence grounded for life. We had no external drive at that point.
New computer for a year or so and then hard drive fails. No external hard drive. Luckily they were able to retrieve my information or most of it under the warranty coverage and it cost me nothing except being without my machine for much longer than I wanted. Finally bought an external hard drive.
Dave, thanks for a good laugh in the morning.
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Brian...I use an external hard drive...and only b/u to it...so you've got me worried but...I don't understand your example....wouldn't your data still be on the ext.drive so you could transfer again to a working drive???
Incidently, just yesterday I asked a friend ...who is very very computor literate....about Windows 7 and he said he might try it but he's going to b/u to another drive and if he has a problem with the new he will just swap drives.
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i too use an external hard drive and confused by your comment. what else is big enough to back up too? thumb drives? dvd's?
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ducksterman,
If I understand your question correctly, you are correct the data is on the external drive and that is where the problem lies. Drives can fail in one of two ways. One is called a "logical" failure. This is where the drive loses an index (what tells it where each file is located), or some other critical piece of data. In these cases data recovery/resoration is fairly simply and there are even free tools to allow a home user to do this. The second type of failure is called a "physical" failure. This can be any type of physical failure of the drive. It may mean the motor stoped working, the read/write head(s) impacted the platters (where the data is written), or the read/write head(s) motor fails.
For me the failure was physical and this is an extremely expensive type of repair (clean room work usually is). The quote I had for $1900 is actually low (I had another quote from another shop for $5000 to $7500 depending on work to be done). The issue comes from the newer drives being so large. In these drives data is stored extremely tightly and this means when a small failure occurs large amounts of data can be lost. In my case the motor siezed up and there just isn't a way to unstick it. Since this incident I've found this occurs with my particular drive extremely frequently (as quickly as days after first use), so once I receive the replacement drive it will be finding it's way to Ebay or Craig's list.
If you are using your external drive for backups you should be okay, the "worse case" scenario would be a failure of your primary hard disk and then a subsequent failure of the external drive while attempting to restore your primary system. While this doesn't happen often it can happen. In my case I'm updating my system with 2 new drives running in a RAID 1 configuration. In this configuration data written to one drive will be duplicated on the second drive. This way one drive can fail with no loss of data. It does reduce the amount of data you can store (as one drive is dedicated to maintaining an exact copy of the other drive), but it is an acceptable loss to me. Plus I'll continue using an external drive for backups only.
Hope this wasn't too technical. With this topic it is easy to get into the weeds.
Brian
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Thanks, Brain...I did follow...just don't ask me to repeat it:roll:...
Still confused on your original problem...was it your external drive that seized or the new primary drive?...either way wouldn't your data be on the drive that didn't seize?
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Normand,
To answer your question directly. I use DVDs for critical data. Those DVDs are then stored off-site (at the bank actually). There are also online services such as Mozy which provide remote backup services (you send your files to them over the internet) for very reasonable prices (Mozy I believe is 19.95 a year for unlimited storage).
Otherwise yes you do face an issue. The problem is, and I think this is a marketing one, external drive manufactures have sold us the idea that their drives are immune from normal drive failures. The reality is that the external drive you have sitting on your desk has a hard drive just like the one in your desktop or laptop (depending on the device size the drive may be a standard desktop drive or a standard laptop drive). These drives have motors which spin platters and motors which move the read/write head(s) in the drive. As with anything mechanical they can, will and do fail. Thus my adivce to backup your most critical data (be they documents, spreadsheets, financial information, photos, etc.) to another form of media. Sure it is inconvenient, but I'm willing to trade the inconvenience for peace of mind at knowing my most important data is secure.
Now on the plus side I think the days of mechanical hard drives are numbered. In the IT world we are already using what are called Solid State Drives. These are in effect large USB thumb drives with several hundred gigabytes worth of data. There are also some newer laptops which are shipping with solid state drives in the 60-100 GB range, but as a downside the solid state drive adds about $500 to the price. However, these drives are in effect bullet proof and their failure rate is phenominally small. In the next year or two I think we'll see this type of drive become price competitive with standard drives and at that point standard drives will disappear from the marketplace due to the enhanced reliability and speed (solid state drives are about 100x faster than a typical hard drive).
Does that help?
Brian
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ducksterman,
It was my external drive which failed, not the primary drive in my system. Unfortuantely while 99% of the data on that drive was a backup of data on one of my systems (I have a few), there is 1% which wasn't and that is where I made my mistake.
Brian
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Whenever I've had to care deeply about data, beyond where a simple backup to another drive wouldn't suffice (thankfully rare now since I've left the computer industry behind) I did the following:
1. Bought two identical external drives. One of these drives alone should be able to comfortably hold all the data you care about.
2. Copied all the data I cared about from my computer to one of these drives and immediately disconnected it from the machine and stuffed it in the drawer. You might do this every night before you go to bed (or via a scheduled job if your operating system supports such things), or every few days.
3. That second drive is my "the house blew up" backup. Once a week, bi-weekly, monthly (whatever makes sense), I copied the data I cared about to that drive and took the drive away. Lock it in your desk at work, get a safe deposit box, whatever works.
4. If either of my backup drives failed, I replaced it immediately, calling out of work if I had to in order to get the drive that day.
Any other solution I've found either requires too much expertise or too much money for most people.
Now, I have two identical internal drives. My main drive has everything and my second drive has copies of all the data I'd like not to lose. Anything I can't live without is stored out on the network on other machines.
Hope this or one of the other suggestions here helps!
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Your mouse issue may have also been related to the accessiblity settings for your computer... Open up the Control Panel and click "Accessibility Options".
Look through the settings here to ensure they are all turned off.
They can accidentally be activated by holding a certain key for a long period of time, or clicking the same key repeatedly in a row.
Anyways, Glad that the problem is gone.
Paul