The HD in my Toppy died, so I decided to replace all the PSU caps at the same time - they weren't too bad but the 3.3v rail was a bit low. That went fine.
Bought a new 500GB PATA HD off Ebay, and it didn't like the Toppy. Had been warned this could happen.
The workshop desktop PC - that doesn't get much use - was assembled by me and has two IDE HDs of about the same age as the Toppy, and neither of them even remotely full, so I decided to try one in it. Copied everything on F onto C, and removed F.
Bet you're ahead of me. I'd actually removed C, plonked it in the Toppy and formatted it...
Yes, there was nothing important on it that wasn't backed up elsewhere. I did wonder if I could simply copy the HD on the other PC which runs the same XP. Like I could do on the Acorns. ;-)
Brought home new base unit, removed from packaging, packed up old unit, took to skip for recycling and arrived just in time to fling the lot in as the skip was being dragged out. Came home and stood staring, wallet broken, at the original base unit sitting in it's cubby hole, all smug and jaunty looking....
Pretty much, though XP itself won't help you, to do it under Windows you need something like Acronis or DriveImage or Ghost.
Booting from a live Linux CD or USB stick OTOH would make it a piece of piss ... fdisk and dd if you like the greybeard method, gparted if you want the easy GUI method.
At work in the 80's we first had Sirius computers on which the Hard drive was Drive A: and the floppy was drive B:. Then we got Compaqs which had the hard dive as C: and the floppy as A:.
So yours truly has to delete a floppy on the Sirius. Put it in , typed (Dos of course) "DEL A:*.*" and pressed Enter. Took a long time to live that one down.
Incidentally, I know Senior Moments as CRAFT moments - Can't Remember A F###ing Thing.
Topfield. It performs the same sort of function as a VCR, except it uses a computer hard disk (HD) to store the video rather than a magnetic tape.
They are very useful devices which completely change your attitude to watching TV - rather than sitting down to see what is on, you see if anything worthwhile has been recorded. And you can skip adverts or pause to make a cuppa if you want. They have the TV listings built into them so you can do clever things such as recording all of a particular series.
There are other similar devices which you may have heard of under names like Sky+, Freeview+, V+, Humax, Tivo, Windows Media Center or MythTV.
And there's me happily thinking he meant one of those kid's devices where you pump up and down like crazy and it revolves at speed making humming noises. ;o)
I had the impression that the hard disks are less-than-trivial to remove/ swap, and (obviously) they only have a limited amount of storage space - in other words, good for temporary "watch it a little bit later" storage, but not really analogous to what people used VCRs for.
Would depend on how many VCR tapes you had. The basic 250GB HD holds IIRC something like 200 hours worth of programmes. And it's meant to be able to work with bigger drives.
However, you can link it to your PC and transfer stuff there for storage if you prefer.
I removed one of the HDs from the duff PC, and installed it in my good one. And did a clone of Drive C to it using HD copy. But the duff machine won't boot from it even although I changed the boot HD in the bios. Recovery using the XP CD is confusing me...
I was gassing to someone today about the poor state of technological awareness amongst the general populace.
Folks may blindly scan read a tabloid or broadsheet newspaper and flit across terms such as 'Sky+' or 'Freeview' or 'iPhone' or 'Internet', and read some scandal happening about matters to do with the product and the people involved, _but_ they will have absolutely no clue what these innovations actually do.
Journalism and PR has trivallised things to give inanimate objects celebrity and fashion status - and only _that_ seems newsworthy - and advertising is unfortuately mostly aimed at those who have seen one product and could possibly desire spending money on another.
The hacks could really do much better spreading out the goodness of technology in everyday life messages out further, but stories like "make sure your set-top box stays unplugged during the night or the planet is doomed" is actually dissuasion for people to actually plug in and successfully use these products.
If the daily maul or the soaraway Sun could, say, run over five days a pullout guide to technology and joe public, focus on what technology does, how we are all going to have to get on with it, leave complicated words out of it, supply humanly accessible links to organisations and other bodies interested in closing the digital divison, and also give guidence for who to call (and how to validate their credentials) when it all goes wrong - we may get that jump on South Korea.
Or, shall we forever moan about closing post office counters .... ;-(
That's not too bad ... certainly more than I'd expected!
Aha, now that is useful! I'd figured that the manufacturers were probably leaned on by movie and TV companies and didn't allow people to do stuff like that, so you got stuck with a self-contained box and had to start binning stuff when space ran out.
not quite in the same league, but a cringeworthy story all the same ...
many years ago, at poly, we used a VAX 750 to do our 8080/Z80 assembler programming. Working in pairs, we had a 3 week assignment to do. Some friends had just finished theirs, and got it working. Jokingly I typed DELETE on their terminal, and hovered my finger over "Enter".
A few friendly threats, and I thought I'd cancel the command by pressing ESC.
Only in VMS (for reasons no one ever explained to me) ESC=3DEnter.
Whoops.
And then it turned out that the only work backed up was final year projects.
Luckily (?) they had just printed out the code, for inclusion in their write-up.
You can guess what I spent the next 3 hours doing ......
My 500GB HD Panasonic PVR hold a mere 75hrs by default which I think records the data stream as transmitted. If you aren't all that fussed about quality it'll stored a silly amount, 2,000+ hours springs to mind but that would probably be worse than VHS...
That's why you buy a PVR with built in Blu-ray burner then you can archive off to Blu-ray or DVD should you want to. B-)
You can, of course, transfer individual recordings to DVD or even VHS if you want. What it won't do is record *from* VHS, etc. Off air only. Although there are similar devices which can.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.