Great piece. After you booted the repaired laptop to Win 10, the next screen showed the Win XP logo. What’s up with that?

Hope I never have to get back into the electronics repair game, but I’ll try to remember this as the best how-to on the subject I’ve seen.

Quick story not related to laptops.

When I built my home media server one goal was paramount for music and movies: rip only once in this lifetime! It took the better part of a year to get 1000 CDs and 400 movies onto the server. To make sure this happened once only, I had configured the server with three hard drives. C: is a 120GB SSD for the Win 10 OS. Drives F: and G: are, respectively, mechanical 2 and 4 TB, dedicated to movies and music. But wait! There’s more!

Each of the F: and G: drives is, in reality, two drives configured as RAID1s, or mirrored pairs, where any data written to one disk is identically written to the other at the same time. This means, of course, that I’m 100% protected against single hardware failures. (I also keep an external backup.)

Rip once in a lifetime. Yeah.

Never having set up a RAID at BIOS level before, there were many exciting moments where inanimate objects mysteriously became airborne. But I’ve found that when you’re doing something you don’t know how to do, you are guaranteed to misunderstand the instructions until you read them with brain fully engaged at least twenty times. Then comes the AHA! moment when you finally get it, and fix your problem.

I have a Mac so maybe no answer but.....

I have all of my music, movies and photos (MMP) on a disk drive and play on (or through) my mac. What you said about RAID intrigues me. Is it possible to duplicate my MMP on another drive and have it always automatically be a duplicate drive? i.e. I record a movie on the drive I use, at the same time it records to another separate drive (or two).

Rip once in a lifetime.....yeah.

Quote from TomAtAlki

I have a Mac so maybe no answer but.....

I have all of my music, movies and photos (MMP) on a disk drive and play on (or through) my mac. What you said about RAID intrigues me. Is it possible to duplicate my MMP on another drive and have it always automatically be a duplicate drive? i.e. I record a movie on the drive I use, at the same time it records to another separate drive (or two).

Rip once in a lifetime.....yeah.

I’m not a Mac guy so I’ll tell you how it can work in WindowsWorld.

Say P is your prime external backup/storage drive and S is a similar drive you want to use as a mirror. Connect both drives to your laptop/desktop (hopefully you have enough ports). With a great utility program called AllWay you set up a Job. In this case you tell it “use P as the source and copy all files you find to S, as long as they’re not already there. Also, if they are there, but what’s on S is newer, then overwrite.”

AllWay has many more options, such as two-way sync and deletion propagation. Don’t know if you can find it for a Mac. Maybe the Mac has a similar utility built in.

Helpful?

Edit: I realize that I didn’t explicitly answer your question. The AllWay setup as described is manual: it will not automatically write to S without your intervention. However, if you keep both drives connected to the Mac, AllWay does have an auto sync mode where changes to P are sensed and written to S.

Quote from Splinter

Ed, this would great material for an article in Dave's Computer Tips.

How to set up a media server

I’m not smart enough to do it as a how-to, but could consider something like “How I ended up with a media server in spite of ignorance and confusion.”

A how-to really requires having done a thing several times so that alternatives and options can be understood. I bashed my head against the wall and got lucky: the wall conceded.

I can see I’m surrounded by very savvy folks.

How do I save MemTest86 results to HTML or even a text file?

Bloody Corsair want blood out of me. Can't find any results from a search

Quote from richietog

How do I save MemTest86 results to HTML or even a text file?

Bloody Corsair want blood out of me. Can't find any results from a search

I didn't need to do that, they accepted a photo from me