RE: filmscanners: Best filmscanner, period!!! (strange title!)

[Ian Boag <ianboag@partslink.co.nz>]

Wotta crusty old bastard. Have to say though that I relate to the stuff
about mission (ie livelihood) critical stuff. You have to have been there.
I have a machine like that too. Experience has just about taught me that no
upgrade is trivial and I'll spend many unbudgeted hours sorting out
unexpected fallout ....

FWIW Here's how I would approach this problem. I'd set things up so all my
HDDs were dismountable in caddys. I'd run GHOST or something similar to
give me a duplicate set to work with. I'd then remove the originals and put
them someplace safe.

If this was Win 9x I'd just plug the copied disk (s) into a new machine and
let P & P sort out any hardware probs for a while. Not an NT user, so I
gather that can't be done. Anyway one can stuff about quite happily on the
copy to scope the OS problems. Maybe I'd even do this on the original
machine with the "real" HDDs parked safely out of it.

My main machine contains all my dev source (I do it for a living). I have
2x30 GB drives in a mirrored RAID setup. One of them is in a caddy. Every
week I take out the demountable drive and replace it. The RAID sorts all
that out and re-syncs it. I have three drives that I rotate through the
caddy slot. I've been bitten by tapes before - nothing beats a REAL HDD
that you can plug into another machine and just have it go.

Sorry for going a bit OT here .....