Dear Diary,
Here's a turn up for the books.
Following up on yesterday's little SyncBack fiasco I was trying to determine why my PC is no longer on speaking terms with my external hard drive. It seemed to be down to an incident involving laundry, specifically a row over lost socks and who owns the the un-claimed third sock. That or it was due to the mysterious USB error 'Code 10' which as far as I can tell simply means, "It aint working". No duh!
So I opened up Device Manager, right clicked on the offending 'Unknown Device' and selected 'Uninstall'. Then I disconnected the External drive, waited a minute and re-connected it. Voila! At least for now... we'll see how long it lasts.
Then I had a brainwave, "Self.. ", I thought, ".. I wonder if we can make Windows assign a fixed drive letter for this device? There must be a way surely: that's how network drives stay mapped after all". Google as always is my friend and sure enough it is possible to assign a consistent drive letter to a USB drive. Thank you 'Dallas Bill' from two years ago and a thousand miles away, thank you Tim Berners-Lee for the World Wide Web and thank you Google!
Now I'm off to play around with drive letters and backup settings.
Happy Monkey. :)
Showing posts with label pc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pc. Show all posts
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Quart into a Half-pint redux
Well Diary,
In an interesting twist the daily backup on my main PC ran this evening and attempted to copy all of my data onto an innocent thumb drive which just happened to have been assigned the same drive letter normally assigned to my external hard drive. Needless to say it filled up all the free space on the thumb and then proceeded to log errors for the remaining directories - 8 pages worth of log file which fortunately was set up to open in a web browser window.
How did this happen? Well, I have been having issues lately with my PC not recognizing my external hard drive at boot up but the root cause of the problem is my backup software - SyncBack. It's really quite powerful as non-business backup solutions go but it does have one fatal flaw: it only pays attention to drive letters. In a World of removable media this is a cardinal sin for backup software.
I have at least four USB thumb drives floating around here as well as a couple of external hard drives and a number of SD / MMC / Sony Memory Sticks. I can plug any of them into my PC at any time and they get assigned a drive letter by Windows. Because it doesn't pay attention to the names I give them - a feature which as far as I can recall has been available since Windows 3.x and floppy discs - SyncBack has no idea which is which.
This had been bugging me for some time with the thumb drives and now it has finally come to a head. Time to look for a different backup solution, one capable of dealing with with realities of 21st Century home computing. Great, yet another research task to add to my already overflowing plate.
If anyone is reading this, I am open to suggestions... I can pay in bananas! :)
In an interesting twist the daily backup on my main PC ran this evening and attempted to copy all of my data onto an innocent thumb drive which just happened to have been assigned the same drive letter normally assigned to my external hard drive. Needless to say it filled up all the free space on the thumb and then proceeded to log errors for the remaining directories - 8 pages worth of log file which fortunately was set up to open in a web browser window.
How did this happen? Well, I have been having issues lately with my PC not recognizing my external hard drive at boot up but the root cause of the problem is my backup software - SyncBack. It's really quite powerful as non-business backup solutions go but it does have one fatal flaw: it only pays attention to drive letters. In a World of removable media this is a cardinal sin for backup software.
I have at least four USB thumb drives floating around here as well as a couple of external hard drives and a number of SD / MMC / Sony Memory Sticks. I can plug any of them into my PC at any time and they get assigned a drive letter by Windows. Because it doesn't pay attention to the names I give them - a feature which as far as I can recall has been available since Windows 3.x and floppy discs - SyncBack has no idea which is which.
This had been bugging me for some time with the thumb drives and now it has finally come to a head. Time to look for a different backup solution, one capable of dealing with with realities of 21st Century home computing. Great, yet another research task to add to my already overflowing plate.
If anyone is reading this, I am open to suggestions... I can pay in bananas! :)
Monday, February 21, 2011
Wakey wakeeey
Dear diary,
Why does my PC take so long to boot up, I wonder? I can understand not wanting to wake up first thing in the morning - I have a hard time booting up in the mornings myself - but it seems to object to being woken from its slumber at any time of day. Sitting on the BIOS splash screen for several minutes just isn't normal but for the life of me, I cannot figure out what the problem is. Most vexing.
Why does my PC take so long to boot up, I wonder? I can understand not wanting to wake up first thing in the morning - I have a hard time booting up in the mornings myself - but it seems to object to being woken from its slumber at any time of day. Sitting on the BIOS splash screen for several minutes just isn't normal but for the life of me, I cannot figure out what the problem is. Most vexing.
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