Had to rebuild Astro Laptop - Grrrrr

[JohnH]

Just venting....but sheesh.

My fairly new astro lappy (April 2012 - Tosh L750) started to misbehave a few weeks ago. CCDSoft crashes, timeouts on the Gemini connection and focuser, occasional failures to detect usb devices...

Well time for a cleanup, it happens. No great drama I have a HDD partition with a recovery program on it that can re-image the main disc as Win7 out of the box. It failed.

Oh you don't get me that easy - I have made copies of the recovery environment on CD. Ha! These also failed.

After much frustration a chkdsk showed bad clusters up, chkdsk/f and the system is useable again. 1 day lost. The recovery partition is dead. And the CDs don't work. And I should probably change the HD....

No matter I have Win 7 retail on DVD. That installed....but man what a perfomance getting it up to date - must have been about 3 or 400 updates, MSE and SP1, many hours of install, update, reboot.

Now I have to re-install all the astro apps drivers:

ASCOM
CCDSoft (plus SBig Driver Checker, update patch and ASCOM focus api)
FocusMac (plus the Moonlite ASCOM driver)
Moonlite NA Focuser App
AstroArt 5, SP2, CCD control
The Sky 6 plus TeleApi
DSS
Gemini.Net
Belkin USB/Serial
Photoshop
sundry other stuff, putty, filezilla etc etc

Plus config and re-test it sll. I do not want to do that again but I know the system will become unstable after a year or two at least that is my experience with Wintel systems if you like me are always installing/updating changing and adding hardware and apps. I would like to be able to snapshot/image a working config to my NAS and/or DVDs so I can restore easily to a fully working setup.

What recommendations do you guys have for a tool to do that?

[multiweb (Marc)]

Buy a second drive, clone it then swap it in the event you have a major crash. 2.5" laptop drives are tiny and easy enough to swap or store.

[ZeroID (Brent)]

It's going to happen again, change the HD to some reputable brand. I do it all the time at work to our PC suppliers stuff. They build with hardware from the cheapest supplier. I had one fail at bootup. De..... err, .. they supplied the new HD under warranty but I had to rebuild it. I've given them a blast on their feedback form ever since.

[2stroke (Jay)]

Get a notebook with dual hd's and mirror raid support, if not at least dual and a win software raid, you can remove your dvd if single and use a software raid as well. Also by WD blacks as they are much more reliable then blues and cheap seats ect.

[Astro_Bot]

Another Toshiba L750 dying a bad death? Not good.

Originally Posted by multiweb

Buy a second drive, clone it then swap it in the event you have a major crash. 2.5" laptop drives are tiny and easy enough to swap or store.

^^^ What he said.

I clone drives most of the time, though there's an alternative for less critical systems, which is to image to a file - it's like cloning but the result is a compressed file of the entire drive (or partition) rather than a bit-wise copy. I do it in Linux. I image after a fresh build, or at major upgrade points, so I have known good states to return to.

[JohnH]

Thanks for the feedback all. I Had forgotten how cheap HDDs are these days - it makes sense to use as a backup - but I would still prefer to put the image on the NAS, but Win7 backup does not let you do that (or at least the home version does not). Perhaps I will go for an SSD and use the old HDD as a backup....

[l3gendluk3 (Luke)]

I am running a laptop with a SSD and I can tell you the performance is amazing. It boots up Windows 8 in a couple of seconds and allows programs such as photoshop and pixinsight to run super fast, and because it has no moving parts, it is very unlikely to break. Also I got to say the freedom of moving my computer without fear of hitting the discs is pretty fun. The only downsides of SSD's are the price and the storage capabilities. My SSD is only 120 gb (not including windows os) and would cost about $150 so I have to store my finished pictures and finished raw files onto an external hard drive and cloud system.

Hope this helps,
-Luke