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Casper catastrophe



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Jimmy et al,

Like many of you, I like to clone my hard disk (drawered so I can swap it if necessary). I used to use Ghost but panicked one day when I wasn't sure which drive was truly Master and which one was Destination. That encouraged me to switch to Casper, as I love its interface, etc. (especially that it can do its thing within Windows).

As you may recall, several weeks ago I had a disaster during a backup that wiped out my backup and caused a registry problem that could only be resolved by reinstalling my Win2k OS. It's been plenty rough since then, but the other night I decided it was time to preserve my hard work, so I used Casper to back up.

At the very end of the backup I got a warning from Zone Alarm Pro that it had defended against something (not an intrusion). I tried clicking on the OK button to make it go away but it wouldn't budge. Things appeared frozen. Suddenly I got the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, just as I did before. After a major hissy fit, I calmed down and tried rebooting my main disk. No luck.

This timing is especially bad (isn't it always) as I was closing in on a trading seminar I'm scheduled to do this week. Desperation drove me to try booting from the cloned copy. It actually made it past the Windows splash screen and was playing the wav file you hear when finally arriving at the Desktop. Suddenly, I got a message saying I was either missing my PageFile or it was too small. The problem was how could I go in to correct that if I couldn't even finish booting.

A friend researched this for me and advised I could assign the C drive designation to the destination drive by booting from a Win98 floppy or CD, then running 'ckdsk /mbr' which would take care of the problem. I am now typing this from the destination drive that's now my main drive, with all my apps intact. Say halleluja!

All of this is to warn others that there MAY be a link between Casper and ZA Pro (latest version) which can cause such disasters. I'm going back behind a router firewall and uninstalling my ZA. Meanwhile, I'm looking for safe alternatives to Casper. I encourage further discussion on this, as many of you really extended yourselves to help me before. I'm very grateful, and hope I can prevent others from similar disasters. This isn't meant to diss Casper per se, as I really loved using it until this came up. I just want to help others prevent similar fates.

Thanx to all,

Michael
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