External Drive

In preparation to upgrading to a new OS and needing to image my current drive, as well as serving as a new drive for my nightly backups (the current old PATA 80GB drive is getting too small) I'm looking to get a new external drive. An external also serves as the, my house is burning and I need to save my data, device; much easier than lugging the entire PC around.

I'm looking for a drive of 1TB. That should hold all my backups as well as serve as media storage.

This does preclude me from getting one of those snazzy flask size drives that you can stick in your shirt pocket. Those are based on a 2.5" laptop drive, but don't have the storage capacity I'm looking for. They also hook up with 2 USB cables (just 1 for the data transfer, 2 to get enough power to avoid an external power source), convenient, but I'm looking for the better transfer speed of eSATA.

So, 1TB, eSATA. That leaves just one big question: buy one straight off the shelf or build my own.

Off the shelf
Pros

• Cheaper - around $90*
• Presumably it has been tested to work reliably between the drive and enclosure.

Cons

• No idea what HDD you're getting.

Custom
Pros

• Can buy exactly the HDD you want. RPM and cache.

Cons

• More expensive. You have to buy a HDD (~$100) and an enclosure (~$30)
• May be some odd reliability/configuration issues between the two pieces.

Naturally, I chose to build my own.

While there is certainly a certain ease in just buying one off the shelf, I just wasn't comfortable not knowing anything about the HDD that came inside.

Given a $90 price point, presumably the enclosure costs some money. If it's sold to be at $30 (which does seem a bit inflated), they must be spending, say, $5 on it. That leaves $85 for the cost of the HDD and their profit. I'm guessing I'm going to be getting an older HDD, without much cache.

Now, for a little bit more money I can go ahead and specify the exact HDD I want, know what the RPM and cache will be. Toss in an enclosure and it should just plug right in without any problems.

Heck, I can buy any HDD and pair it with any mobo without worrying about compatibility. I'd assume enclosures are as worry free.

In the end I went with a Rosewill enclosure as I've purchased other accessories by them before with good luck. Wanting eSATA and 3.5" size drove the price up a bit from a cheap $8 to $30. A bit inflated I think, but I hope it has good reliability.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182179

For drive choice I went with a Caviar Black as it seems to be leading the 1TB pack right now in terms of performance.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=488
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17812

The parts have arrived and I've assembled them quickly and without any hassles. The enclosure is solid feeling and looks good. No complaints. The drive seems just fine. I'm not using this in any performance centric application at the moment (despite my reasoning based on performance when buying it) so I assume it's just fine.

Now it's time to point my backups to this drive and image my hard drive before I upgrade.

* Prices are for early March '10 when I was looking around. Now they're even cheaper.

Win7 Installation - Planning

In the last post I mentioned that I want to install Win7 in the most complicated way possible:

1. /Users on a Data drive (including Shared/Public/Common folders)
2. Page file on  a FAT32 partition
3. Hibernation file on a FAT32 partition
4. OS on a NTFS partition
5. /ProgramData on the Data drive

In this post I'm going to explore the various ways to move the user files to a data drive.

"Move" User Folders

Some people suggest to just move the "My Documents" folder to the Data drive.

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_shell_folders.htm

http://www.vista4beginners.com/Move-user-files-folders-to-another-partition

I don't like this because it seems like a partial goal. Also you'd still end up w/ the Temp folder, the Temp Internet folder, your AppData folder and a few others on the OS drive which goes against the whole purpose of having all the user data on the Data drive (for ease of backup).

Change the Registry
Other people suggest that you install Win7 as normal with a throwaway user ID, then go and change registry settings to point the user profile folder to your other drive, then recreate your users.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itprovistasetup/thread/91aa8b26-2b09-4e56-955c-679b297832e1
(This link is a mishmash of different techniques)

http://joshmouch.wordpress.com/2007/04/07/change-user-profile-folder-location-in-vista/

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.windows.vista.installation_setup&tid=1454df94-207c-4b75-95bb-9e92154d9827&cat=en_US_d02fc761-3f6b-402c-82f6-ba1a8875c1a7&lang=en&cr=&sloc=en-us&m=1&p=1
(This link is a pretty confusing set of forum posts. I think a lot of the questions and answers are interleaved within one comment post without the usual indentations to indicate a quote of a previous post.

I don't like this method of changing the registry because it seems like it's a lot of after the fact workarounds.

Symbolic Links / Junction Points

This one suggests to use junction points/mounts to redirect windows from where it thinks the folders are to where you actually want to put them.

http://www.vistax64.com/vista-installation-setup/42167-how-do-install-users-directory-different-drive.html

This isn't too bad; from my Linux background I used a lot of links (both symbolic and hard). But, this is still not a real answer. Waving your hand and misdirecting the OS is just an illusion. I want the OS to really know that these folders are in a new location.

However there are still a number of apps out there that hard code their paths and I may have to use this in combination with the method below to accommodate those sub-par apps.

Unattended Installation

The real answer seems to lie with doing an unattended install. With this you can actually tell Windows where you want its special folders before doing a clean install of the OS.

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/12/10/9188555.aspx

Next post I'll get into the details of configuring an unattended installation...

Virus 3

A2Free died on me. Three crash windows were up when I checked on it. Oh well, I hoped the other apps did their job.

Next, I ran McAfee Stinger then some other random utilities (EZPcFix,  RootKitty) which I had no idea how they worked; the UIs on some of these free tools is a bit cryptic.

Looking at the rest of the utilities on UBCD4Win didn't seem like there was much else useful to run, so I held my breath and rebooted using my hard drive.

Everything looks ok; I can get to the anti-virus web pages now and can run anti spyware/virus utils without them locking up. I'm guessing this means I'm virus free once again.

So, on to the next task of installing Win7. See my next post for that.

Future Topics

Here are some of the things I plan on doing and discussing here:

• Fix virus on PC
• Install Windows 7
• Overclock the PC
• Convert CDs to FLAC & MP3
• Essential apps for my PC
• Backup PC
• Buy external drive
• GMail backup
• Get my home theater working
• Install Win7 to my netbook - Is this even a good idea?

New OS Installation - Background

So, I mentioned that I plan on installing Win7 pretty soon. First, for purely "never give up" reasons, I'm trying to fix this virus I currently have. Once that's done with I want to move to Win7 64-bit.

Of course I'm going to do a clean install. So, no big deal, I've installed it at work a small handful of times already; it's a simple smooth install. Why bother blogging about it?

Because I am unable to just do things the simple way. Customization is my middle name.

When I built this PC (back in Jan '07) I wanted faster application response. After reading many articles, I decided the best (with limited budget) way to do this was to have one fast drive as the boot drive (WD Raptor 74GB, 10k rpm) and a bigger, but slower drive to hold data (Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7.2k rpm). (This was the best one could do in the pre SSD days without hassling with RAID.)

After using it for two years it doesn't really seem to have paid off. I still have to wait agonizingly long for the PC to finish booting and to launch new app, and especially to switch between users. This may be the infamous Windows cruft that accumulates after three years of use and installing too many utility apps.

Nonetheless, for my Win7 upgrade I'm going to do it again.

On XP I never did manage to completely get all the user data over onto the data drive. Unlike linux where you can specify which partition to use for the various root level folders, Windows gives you no such opportunity to say that you want "Documents & Settings" on the D: drive. The best I did, after the users were created, was to move the "My Documents" location for everybody. Really that's 90% good enough. However you do end up with the odd scenario where you drag a file from "My Photos" onto your desktop and it does a copy instead of a move.

With Win7 I want to do this right from the installation, not as an after fact.

I also want to have the page file and the hibernate file on a different logical drive/partition formatted with FAT32 vs the OS partition as NTFS.

to be continued...

Virus 2

That night I come home and my wife tells me that the PC is effed up again. I went upstairs and it was locked up. Reboot and it's much the same situation as before. This time I notice in the registry that there's stuff with "extrac64_cab.exe" and "winhlp64.exe"

I'm running Win XP Sp3 32-bit, so any file that implies it's for a 64-bit OS is lying on my machine. Crap. More viruses to get rid of.

I do the same stuff as yesterday: safe mode, run Mbam which locks after a while, run SpyBot which locks after a while. Now I'm starting to get royally effed by this/these virus/malware apps.

At work the next day, I made a bootable CD using UBCD4Win. (Which I ended up using at work to help my boss reset the Admin password on an old PC we were reusing.)

That night I started my PC up using that boot CD and ran Mbam, SpyBot and A2Free.

We'll see how that's going when I get home tonight.

Virus!

My home PC has become infected with a virus, "Malware Defense". Being a manly man and all I don't run an active virus scanner; slows down the computer too much and I know better so as to not get a virus. Crap!

Maybe it's better classified as malware, not a virus (obvious from it's name, no?). It doesn't seem to do anything much to affect my daily activities (email, surfing, flash games). What it does is prevent/redirect my browser (chrome) from displaying any anti-virus/spyware pages.

Fortunately, I have a netbook in the house (Asus Eee PC 900A), so I used that to go to the removal pages and download a few tools (Malwarebytes Anti-Malware).

My home PC is still running Windows XP (currently prepping it to move to Win7, but that's a future post). I booted into safe mode, removed a bunch of reg entries manually (following those listed on the removal page), ran the Mbam tool and all looked good.

I rebooted and it looked ok; I could hit those web pages. So, that was that for the night.