Mark said:
Hello Paul,
Just a few loose ends if I may,
I created a recovery disk for the 8500
(64 bit)today with no hitch whatsoever
but should I now test these disks? To
tell you the truth I'm a little leery
of doing so and messing things up.
Regarding the Tinypics and screenshots;
I followed the same procedure as you
describe e.g.
You take a screenshot, put it in a file,
and upload it to tinypic.com . And in the
other direction, if someone gives you a
long URL with tinypic.com in it, your
browser will convert that into an image.
However, it's not converting it into images
either mine or yours.
Thanks,
Robert
There are articles on the topic of images not
appearing in a browser. I doubt any of these
apply to you, but you can browse through the
article anyway.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fix-problems-images-not-show
Perhaps you have disabled Javascript in the
browser. The tinypic site needs to display
all of that stupid flashing advertising,
and it might use Javascript for that.
Now, if you're absolutely desperate to look at the image
on tinypic, there is a way you can test.
Inside this ZIP, is the program "curl.exe", which is a way
to fetch things from web sites. The program lacks recursion
options, making it safer for these simple image fetch operations.
http://www.paehl.com/open_source/?download=curl_736_0.zip
curl.exe 498,176 bytes
Next, there is a GUI program, to give a nice window to work in.
http://www.paehl.com/open_source/index.php?download=GuiCURL.zip
That one has the following files inside.
gui_curl.exe 411,136 bytes
proxy.cfg Does not need to be edited. Would be used
if your Internet access used a proxy.
readme.txt
target.cfg Edit with notepad, and change c:\download
to a convenient download folder path for your
usage.
Place all five of those files in a single folder.
Once target.cfg is edited and saved, now double click gui_curl.exe.
In the picture here, which you can't see of course, the GUI
is pretty easy. You enter the URL in the top box, and leave
all the other settings alone. The Proxy is disabled. The
URL you enter, should be the type with the letter "o"
at the beginning of the URL, and JPG on the end. So in
fact, this URL is ready to plug into the top box of
gui_curl program.
http://oi57.tinypic.com/2ppn8ed.jpg
When you click "Download", the JPG file gets stored on
your hard drive, in the location you specified in the
target.cfg text file.
Now, go to your downloads folder, double click the
JPG file that was freshly downloaded (2ppn8ed.jpg would
be the file name in this case), and you can look at it
with the Windows image thing.
That's awfully complicated, but it is a way to get the
image file itself, without the baloney. As long as
I give the actual URL of the image (leading "o",
trailing ".jpg"), there's a chance the method will work.
Note that, a web site *never* has to do what you want
it to do. The programming of the website can deny this
kind of access. This one test case, seemed to work.
*******
To test restoration from a backup, you could take
a spare hard drive, and use it as the target of
the restoration. Then, see if it boots OK. The
hard drive should be at least as big as the drive
that was backed up, for fewest problems. While
Macrium can resize the restored partition, it might
choose to do that only if the last partition on the
disk needs to be resized. Not if the middle partition
needs to be made smaller. There is a limited capability there.
So you would need:
1) Bare metal restore boot CD (the one you just made
)
2) External drive to hold backups.
3) Additional blank internal drive, to use for
testing of restorations. Restore your OS to
the blank drive, then boot the newly filled drive
to prove it all worked.
Now, I could do it with one less drive than that. The
trick to doing it, with nothing more than the external
hard drive to assist, is to have one tried-and-tested
backup/restore method that works for sure. I use "dd"
for that, available for Windows or Linux. It's slow,
it uses a lot of space. But it also means not having
to spend more money on a blank drive. For example,
I can back up one of my 500GB boot drives, to my 1TB
backup, using "dd", but it's going to take hours to do that.
The "dd" program does not have a nice interface, and
you have to be careful with it, because you can
easily erase stuff if you type the wrong command.
Any backup programs which have a GUI, work at a higher
level, do "intelligent" copies, you can't really trust those
without testing them. As you rightly point out, you don't
know now whether your backup scheme is fully working. It
will either take the usage of a known-working backup method
(to back up the disk before you test the Macrium Restore),
or it will take a backup scheme which is so low level,it
cannot fail (dd.exe).
The dd method just backs up all the sectors. And as long
as you have an OS to run it, it works. I use a Linux LiveCD
to run a copy of dd. I also dual boot more than one Windows OS,
to run dd.exe.
So we have a balance here:
1) Buy a blank drive, and do the test restore to that.
Requires little knowledge to get this going. Costs
$100 for a blank drive of some sort. The blank drive
will also be your replacement drive, when the original
drive wears out some day. This is an approach for people
with the money to waste on it.
2) Use the spare space on the existing external drive,
and a known-working backup method. For me, this is
"dd". But this method is not entirely fool-proof.
It uses the command line. So you have to be comfortable
with the command line, and figuring the stuff out. It
doesn't have a nice GUI.
Backup C: drive to external using DD.
Restore Macrium image to C: drive. If the
restore using Macrium fails, use the known-working
DD method, to put back the DD backup image.
As long as you had one backup copy you could trust,
you can then afford to test other unknown backups,
such as your freshly made Macrium.
I keep "dd" copies of my dual boot OS drives (two separate
disks), on a third external disk. I also keep more
convenient Macrium Images. It's part of a multi-pronged
backup approach. There really isn't a reason for me to
use or need my "dd" copies, but they're there for emergencies.
Paul
