You can get external hard drives that connect to a USB port. Just hook it right up to the computer that you are using. It gets set up as the next drive letter. If you've got a C: drive and a CD or DVD drive at D:, the external drive might become E:.
You can have all your program shortcuts point to E: instead of C:. Not a big deal.
The effort involved would be to change your shortcuts on each machine. On your desktop machine, you might have another drive, and then the external would become the F: drive.
what about having the same programs on each computer and use the external drive as your documents drive?
If you have firewire or USB 2.0 on each of the computers it is very straight forward. You can get mini drives that are pocket sized or get full sized drives ranging from 10 gigs to 300 gigs.
Good suggestions. That would take care of about 90% of it. However there are some programs that won't work unless they are on the C drive (though they are becoming fewer and fewer).
The other problem is that there are settings and preferences and the like that exist on the C: drive in places I don't even know where they are.
Plus traveling with a laptop AND an external drive is a bit of a pain. But I appreciate the discussion. thanks for the ideas.
If I remember- It is very easy to remove the hard drive on IBM Thinkpads. If you used one of those for your laptop and set your desktops up with a removeable bay you could drop the IBM laptop hard drive into the desktops. The hard Drive connections probably aren't designed for that much use thought.
I thought of something If someone is going to try this (Swapping C drives). You are going to need the correct drivers and such for each computer- the bios and sound cards and such . Windows might get upset- In fact XP might require you to call in and re- register. Because when it auto detects the changes appear so drastic. This could defeat much of the convienince you are trying to achieve.
Buy two of these, one for home and one for office. You will need two hard drives for each system. Buy a 3rd hard drive to keep off site for added security. You can at any time make your office drive become your home drive by bringing it home with you and inserting the drive into drive 1.
Works for me. I find it is better than RAID, less complicated.
Constantly mirrors two hard drives for security.
When you travel just use a laptop and brich your relevant data with you. When you get home save your work on your office computer.
There are many other solutions ranging from PC Anywhere to laptops that hook up to an office docking station at each location. SOme laptops are powerful these days and can do most anything.
Beware of using any external drive enclosure that uses the Prolific PL 3507 USB2/FireWire-to-IDE bridge chip. I just tried to put a new hard drive in one, and the driver caused an immediate blue screen of death and reboot. It would not let me back in to my computer, and so far, it has prevented me from reinstalling WinXP to fix it. I don't yet know how I'm going to get around it, since now I can't even boot in Safe Mode because the XP Setup tanked.
System Restore is a joke. I tried restoring to previous restore points five times, and none of them were able to do so. They all died on reboot.
If you are talking about what I think you are, I agree. In fact I do not think it is a good idea to have an external drive as your main hard drive with OS and data on it. For one thing, I think it would be slow compared to SATA or IDE.
Oh, nevermind, I see you are talking about an external drive that caused corruption in your C drive. Hmmm never heard of that happening. But that's OK, I have see a new USB optical mouse installation wreak havoc and cause a reinstall of XP!
That EZ drive case, however is not of this external type. It is installed via IDE cable directly into the motherboard. Yet it is 2 drives, one mirroring the other for an easy way to back up. I have tested it.
You can simply remove one of the drives, take it to another computer (similar in nature but does not have to be identical by any means). Turn on the computer and it boots right up. It is a duplicate drive, not a ghost image. No Riad hardware or soafware needed. That's why I like this solution. Simple and easy.
External drives are good for storage, backups off site and things of that nature. For example, if I saw you at the CFF reunion, I could bring my entire music collection including videos on an external and give it to you in a matter of minutes if you brought a large enough laptop. Then you could give me a copy of all of yours as well. This is just a hypothetical situation, of course.
I like the kind you can open and install any hard drive you want rather than a fixed unopenable drive. Though they say they do not require a driver, I have found that they come with software which is beneficial to have installed on any computer you are going to use it on. Sometimes it is required to change a drive letter as well.
Zixar, is the computer saying, "no operating system found",
In my limited experience, I have found that BSOD"S are almost always a hardware conflict. Try removing everything, sound card, NIC, modem, even graphics if you have to, maybe even the floppy. Then try booting. I am sure you have checked BIOS for stuff there too. Try diasbling the USB in BIOS. I don't know. Could be a lot of things.
This the kind you open and put your own drive into. Actually it's the second brand I tried, but both had that doubly-cursed PL3507 chip in them. The first wouldn't even show up on the FireWire list, but the second trashed my PC, even without installing a new driver.
My external DVD burner has the Oxford 311 chip, and works perfectly. It's FireWire-only, though.
It's not saying "no operating system". The WinXp screen comes up, and the little blue marks scroll across the bar eleven times, then wham! BSOD, blink, reboot. I've tried boot logging and it won't tell me which driver is killing it. Now that I tried to repair it with reinstalling, it's hangs up on an MSDART.DLL error. I've got a newer copy of that DLL and will try it tonight, but this is just a royal PITA.
igotout: Nope! Not when you've started a repair install of XP over the old one. It locks you out of Safe Mode until the install can complete.
Fortunately, I was able to boot off of a DOS disk and copy the new DLL over the old one. Setup then ran through. I had to install SP1a again, then download 32 different updates and patches, but at least it works now. I've just resigned myself to using the drive in the slow USB2 mode instead of FireWire.
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Steve!
I don't know that it needs to be bootable.
You can get external hard drives that connect to a USB port. Just hook it right up to the computer that you are using. It gets set up as the next drive letter. If you've got a C: drive and a CD or DVD drive at D:, the external drive might become E:.
You can have all your program shortcuts point to E: instead of C:. Not a big deal.
The effort involved would be to change your shortcuts on each machine. On your desktop machine, you might have another drive, and then the external would become the F: drive.
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pawtucket
My,
what about having the same programs on each computer and use the external drive as your documents drive?
If you have firewire or USB 2.0 on each of the computers it is very straight forward. You can get mini drives that are pocket sized or get full sized drives ranging from 10 gigs to 300 gigs.
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Steve!
Well, except legally you would have to pay for each copy of the software, generally. Unless you had no problem with pirated software.
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My3Cents
Good suggestions. That would take care of about 90% of it. However there are some programs that won't work unless they are on the C drive (though they are becoming fewer and fewer).
The other problem is that there are settings and preferences and the like that exist on the C: drive in places I don't even know where they are.
Plus traveling with a laptop AND an external drive is a bit of a pain. But I appreciate the discussion. thanks for the ideas.
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ckeer
If I remember- It is very easy to remove the hard drive on IBM Thinkpads. If you used one of those for your laptop and set your desktops up with a removeable bay you could drop the IBM laptop hard drive into the desktops. The hard Drive connections probably aren't designed for that much use thought.
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Steve!
CK -
what???
I've got an IBM Thinkpad with a removable hard drive.
There's NO way that the hard drive from the ibm will fit into a desktop computer.
Unless you know something that I don't know.
br,
Steve
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ckeer
Steve! This is what I have used to run laptop drives in removable bays. I assume IBM drive have the same mini ins
This Is an adapter to connect the Laptop drive to a standard IDE- I have one but it looks different
http://www.provantage.com/buy-7cbtr00e-lap...05-shopping.htm
You would use these in a removable bay like one of these.
http://www.dealtime.com/xPO-IDE_Removable_...ck_IDE66BASICBK
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Steve!
Wow, awesome!
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My3Cents
COOL! that's great.
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ckeer
I thought of something If someone is going to try this (Swapping C drives). You are going to need the correct drivers and such for each computer- the bios and sound cards and such . Windows might get upset- In fact XP might require you to call in and re- register. Because when it auto detects the changes appear so drastic. This could defeat much of the convienince you are trying to achieve.
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igotout
Hello My 3,
Try this:
Duplidisk 3 raid case
Buy two of these, one for home and one for office. You will need two hard drives for each system. Buy a 3rd hard drive to keep off site for added security. You can at any time make your office drive become your home drive by bringing it home with you and inserting the drive into drive 1.
Works for me. I find it is better than RAID, less complicated.
Constantly mirrors two hard drives for security.
When you travel just use a laptop and brich your relevant data with you. When you get home save your work on your office computer.
There are many other solutions ranging from PC Anywhere to laptops that hook up to an office docking station at each location. SOme laptops are powerful these days and can do most anything.
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Zixar
Beware of using any external drive enclosure that uses the Prolific PL 3507 USB2/FireWire-to-IDE bridge chip. I just tried to put a new hard drive in one, and the driver caused an immediate blue screen of death and reboot. It would not let me back in to my computer, and so far, it has prevented me from reinstalling WinXP to fix it. I don't yet know how I'm going to get around it, since now I can't even boot in Safe Mode because the XP Setup tanked.
System Restore is a joke. I tried restoring to previous restore points five times, and none of them were able to do so. They all died on reboot.
Stay far, far away from these enclosures.
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igotout
If you are talking about what I think you are, I agree. In fact I do not think it is a good idea to have an external drive as your main hard drive with OS and data on it. For one thing, I think it would be slow compared to SATA or IDE.
Oh, nevermind, I see you are talking about an external drive that caused corruption in your C drive. Hmmm never heard of that happening. But that's OK, I have see a new USB optical mouse installation wreak havoc and cause a reinstall of XP!
That EZ drive case, however is not of this external type. It is installed via IDE cable directly into the motherboard. Yet it is 2 drives, one mirroring the other for an easy way to back up. I have tested it.
You can simply remove one of the drives, take it to another computer (similar in nature but does not have to be identical by any means). Turn on the computer and it boots right up. It is a duplicate drive, not a ghost image. No Riad hardware or soafware needed. That's why I like this solution. Simple and easy.
External drives are good for storage, backups off site and things of that nature. For example, if I saw you at the CFF reunion, I could bring my entire music collection including videos on an external and give it to you in a matter of minutes if you brought a large enough laptop. Then you could give me a copy of all of yours as well. This is just a hypothetical situation, of course.
I like the kind you can open and install any hard drive you want rather than a fixed unopenable drive. Though they say they do not require a driver, I have found that they come with software which is beneficial to have installed on any computer you are going to use it on. Sometimes it is required to change a drive letter as well.
Zixar, is the computer saying, "no operating system found",
In my limited experience, I have found that BSOD"S are almost always a hardware conflict. Try removing everything, sound card, NIC, modem, even graphics if you have to, maybe even the floppy. Then try booting. I am sure you have checked BIOS for stuff there too. Try diasbling the USB in BIOS. I don't know. Could be a lot of things.
Good luck with that prob.
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Zixar
This the kind you open and put your own drive into. Actually it's the second brand I tried, but both had that doubly-cursed PL3507 chip in them. The first wouldn't even show up on the FireWire list, but the second trashed my PC, even without installing a new driver.
My external DVD burner has the Oxford 311 chip, and works perfectly. It's FireWire-only, though.
It's not saying "no operating system". The WinXp screen comes up, and the little blue marks scroll across the bar eleven times, then wham! BSOD, blink, reboot. I've tried boot logging and it won't tell me which driver is killing it. Now that I tried to repair it with reinstalling, it's hangs up on an MSDART.DLL error. I've got a newer copy of that DLL and will try it tonight, but this is just a royal PITA.
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igotout
Should be able to get into safe mode.
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Zixar
igotout: Nope! Not when you've started a repair install of XP over the old one. It locks you out of Safe Mode until the install can complete.
Fortunately, I was able to boot off of a DOS disk and copy the new DLL over the old one. Setup then ran through. I had to install SP1a again, then download 32 different updates and patches, but at least it works now. I've just resigned myself to using the drive in the slow USB2 mode instead of FireWire.
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igotout
USB 2 vs Firewire. To me there is not much of a difference in real life transfers. Both are good. Check out this guy's conclusion:
FIrewire and USB 2
USB 2 seems to be outselling Firewire in popularity at least.
But on the horizon is Firewire 800 which I think will change everything!
Check out this article:
Firewire 800
I hate having to reinstall, yet I am faced with having to do so soon myself. Always something! Good luck.
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Zixar
Not so here.
FireWire : ~30Mbytes/sec
USB2.0: ~11.5Mbytes/sec.
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