How To Recover Your PC 
By: The Webmaster For WebNovice

A couple of weeks ago WebNovice's office was down for quiet sometime due to a failure of the main computer. The hard drive took a siesta and decided not to wake up.

Most servers use expensive tape backup devices which are very high capacity such as 10 GB or greater. Your average PC buyer nor WebNovice could afford one of those high tech drives with prices from $899 to over $1000, but we did come up with another system we feel is actually better for our purposes.

After The Crash
The first things that was necessary was to reformat one drive and replace the other hard drive that was riddled with problems. Here are the steps we have used to implement our new system.

0. This is Ground Zero - Your system is frizzle fried and you are sitting there with a scrambled hard drive.  We used Tiramisu 32, which allowed us to recover lost HTML, Word and other documents we urgently rely upon. We then used Disk Manager along with EZ Drive to re-format our hard drives.

1. Gather all the drivers from every 3.5" diskette.
Copy these files into directories, with logically named volumes -
Then burn them onto a single CD.

Why?  This will save hours of time hunting down those driver disks, when you can have it on one CD that windows can search.

2. Install your Windows with the same options you rely on running it.
Use Drive Image to make an image of your entire system, and whatever
programs that are essential to your business or entertainment.

Why? With Drive Image you can restore your entire system in 15 minutes or less! As soon as you do an Image Restore, you are instantly running - No re-installing Windows ever again.

3. Backup your registry and INI files.

Why? If you ever do need to reinstall Windows for any reason, your programs will still work with your Registry & INI files restored. Plus they will fit on a disk with compression.

How to backup your registry:
You can use a shareware registry program, or you can copy system.da0 and user.da0 to a directory, and then ZIP it.

If you don't have a ZIP program, you can download WinZip and also learn how to zip files from there or go to our How To section.

4. Backup DATA files often. You don't need a huge backup system to keep your important files backed up. If you do web work, keep those web pages backed up on disk! If you have larger files, keep them backed up at least  once a week with a CD Re-Writeable.

You can buy CD-RWs now for as low as $139. And media for $8.00.

Why? With Windows 98 task scheduler, there is no excuse not to backup very often, especially when weeks of work is at stake.

Once you have this new system in place, you can be back up and running in minutes instead of hours or days.

 

[Home | Forum | Tutorials | How To | Archive |  Tips 'N Tricks | Decoder | Bookstore | Reader Survey]
[FAQs | Weekly Tip | Search | About WebNovice | Contact Us | Writer's Info | Advertiser's Info]

This Website and its contents are copyright © 1997, 1998 and 1999
NetData, Inc. and Webscape Communications, Crystal River, FL, USA
WebNovice Privacy Statement