Surajit said:
This is my fourth question to this group. In all the earlier cases I
got good responses. The question is:
The configuration of my computer is P-4, Win XP with SP2 as OS, 160
GB HDD,
1.0 GB Ram. I am now going to format and reinstall my computer for
the first time. I am not an expert in this case, but I just want to
try by myself. I want to know approximately how much time will it
require for that purpose.
An hour plus for the operating system.
A couple/few hours for the applications and customizing everythign
back the way you want things.
I am asking this question because in our
part of the country electricity often plays hide and seek. There is a
maximum fear that during formatting & reinstallation process load
shadding (i.e. disruption of power supply) from the State Electricity
Board of my town will occur. I have power back up for only 20 - 25
minutes. What should I do if power supply goes blank in the midway of
the process? In such a case is it possible that I shut down my
computer and when power supply resumes I again start from the point
where I shut down.
Ouch. First, you definietly should know how to rebuild from scratch, so
that's a good exercise.
Second, even if you get it done without a power glitch, power that bad
is going to give you many ongoing headaches over time. Anytime power
drops is an opportunity to mess up the hard drive and almost a certainty
to mess it up if it was doing writes at the time.
It is only sometimes possible to resume an install where it left off
when you've been hit by a grid power problem. It normally runs about an
hour and a half IME to do the XP install. Then you have another hour or
two while you install all of your applications and get everything set up
the way you want them.
I would strongly recommend your purchasing a UPS. APC as mentioned here
already is a good brand and mine works great. The batteries in them
seem to last for 3-5 years, closer to 5 in my case, and they completely
isolate the computer from a power loss or brownout or ... .
I only get slightly under a half hour of battery runtime in my case,
so you would want to oversize your UPS in order to extend that IF you
want to do manual rebuilds too, but I'd recommend a different route.
A UPS will give you a finite amount of runtime in order to gracefully
exit and shut down the machine and even will force a ShutDown or
Hibernate after xx minutes; all programmable. In your case you'd want
to use Hibernate so you could continue the install when you power back
up off the grid and let the UPS recharge its battery.
While IMO It's good for one to have the experience of rebuilding from
scratch, it's not a necessity. The fastest and easiest way to recover a
disk drive, even from a catastrophic loss of a drive, is to use imaging
software. Norton Ghost from Symantec.com and Acronis True Image are the
two most often used/talked about. For example, I can restore my system
C drive from scratch in about 18 minutes. Pop the CD in the drive,
boot, click to Restore, click on the Restore point to use, and the
program does the rest.
Unfortunately they are not free, but believe me after you've used them
a couple of times compared to the 4 hours or more likely couple of days
getting everything manually rebuilt and customized, you'll be loving
them. It strikes me that you may get more than the usual amount of use
from such a thing with your power situation. Power problems like that
can even sometimes totally render the machine unbootable.
Of course, and it costs money again, you do want to keep your backups
either on DVDs (more time consuming) or at least on an external drive.
The external drive and occasionally making DVDs is the most useful
strategy, but at least the external drive is sort of almost as good.
Things go wrong with them too, same as an internal drive, unfortunately.
I guess there are some freebie backup programs but I don't kn ow
anything about them. You might check at places like sourceforge or
eldergeek for open source backups. If you go that route, just be
certain they can use VSS (Volume Shadow Services) or you won't be able
to back up your C system drive. Some backup programs cannot backup
files in use; VSS gets you around that limitation.
May I ask where you live? Power shedding on a permanent basis like that
is pretty non-standard stuff! Or is power from other than the normal
grid? It almost sounds like you're living totally green.
Best of luck,
Twayne
