IT Professionals

PC Repair – Anywhere!

Posted by on May 18, 2007 | 8 Comments

As some of you may know, I will be moving further down the ankles of Washington State here soon (Vancouver) as my wife to be will be attending a new school in Portland, OR. Unfortunately, this means that me continuing to be the “family tech support guy” is going to be challenging at best. So I have been hunting around for the best, easiest to implement option for my family members use should their OS installations (Windows) go belly up. And as rare as it it generally is, not being able to rush over to fix things does indeed, present a problem. No dual booting, this had to be a repair that can deal with complete hard drive failure.

After a bit of searching, I happened upon this solution, which looks as if it would hold out a lot of promise. What I like most about it is that there us zero “remote fixing” involved. Just turn the knob and reboot – everything comes up groovy! Keep in mind that I am looking at time versus cost here and time is something I do not have a lot of right now. Using fancy NAS (Network Attached Storage) solutions, RAID arrays and so on are just not on the menu for these basic PCs I am working with here.

So this brings me to you folks. What experiences have you had with hard drive switches such as the one mentioned above? Bad or good feeling about using them again? Are there any ‘gotchas’ that you may have come accross? Whatever your experiences, use the comments section to tell me about them if you would be so kind.

[tags]switch,hard drive, PCs,NAS,RAID[/tags]

  • Dewey Thames

    Read your article on hard drive selectors. I have been using a Romtec
    Trios II hard drive selector for five or six years and have had no problems and it is easy to set up. I think the company is still out of business but can purchase on Ebay. http://computers.search.ebay.com/Romtec-Trios_Computers-Networking_W0QQ_trksidZm37QQfromZR40QQsacatZ58058

  • Robert Kubichek

    Why don’t you make a recover dvd using Norton’s Ghost 2005???
    1st make a floppy with it, then edit the autoexec.bat to automatically go to the recover image on the dvd.
    You must for safety, put in some “PAUSE” questions (1 or 2) to make sure that this is what the user wants to do….
    You can also specify the destination drive as well…
    There is Soo much you can from a batch file, BUT “KISS” is the word..
    (K)eep (I)t (S)imple (S)illy

  • Joe

    A less expensive solution might be a removable hard drive rack with an extra drawer. If there is a problem, slide out the drawer/drive, insert the backup drawer/drive, and reboot.

  • http://www.matthartley.com Matt Hartley

    Robert:
    I considered this type of option, although I do not use Symantec products any longer – personal rule of mine. but Mirroring options are great for me, but I need ‘turn the know” fix simplicity. Also, I wanted to consider a hardware solution as Ghost type solutions can (as rare as it may be) can fail to recover properly. Again, super rare, but I need foolproof and Ghost is about 97% in my opinion. Still, I will keep the idea in the back of my head…as a possibility. I hate to dismiss things too quickly. Thanks! :)

  • http://www.matthartley.com Matt Hartley

    Joe:

    Interesting idea. Had not considered this. If the drivers can be removed fairly easily, this could work with a compatible case. Good stuff, thanks.

  • http://www.matthartley.com Matt Hartley

    Dewey:
    Nice, IDE, SCSI, and Serial ATA and it’s cheaper. Considering your experience with the unit, this also makes me feel better. Hell for this price, I may pick up a couple for myself just to keep handy!

    So yeah, I need to consider Ghost, a removable hard drive rack and of course, you solution. All valid options with strengths. Looks like I need to examine each very closely. Thanks everyone

  • David Shear

    I use the caddy solution, with Acronis for cloning the drives. Make all your drives “Cable Select”, use two caddies – then you can clone onto the “slave caddy” (the one on the middle IDE connector). To switch out, simply power off change over the drives and away you go with the clone.

    Better yet, the cloned backup can be kept out of the machine, then if bigger disaters strike, you’ve got a safely backed up complete system.

  • Phil

    Hi Matt

    Would Faronics DeepFreeze be any use? It’s great fun to delete all files on the hard drive in front of students, and then watch their faces as you reboot the computer and everything works as normal again!

    Phil

    http://www.faronics.com/