Pack An Emergency Toolkit

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday November 12, 2005

Bill Bennett

It's possible you'll sail happily through life without encountering hardware or software failure. Possible, but not likely - engineers have yet to build a crash-proof computer.

When things go wrong, you'll want to get back to normal quickly. The key lies in being prepared. We all recognise the value of data back-up, but there's more to disaster-recovery than copying files. Before restoring files, you'll need to get your computer working again.

Start by ensuring your computer can boot from something other than its hard drive; with an older PC, create an emergency floppy disk. Generally, computers try to boot from a floppy before looking for a hard drive. Newer PCs don't always have floppy drives; presumably their makers thought them unnecessary - the way the Titanic didn't need a full set of lifeboats.

Thankfully, most modern PCs have CD drives. However, computers don't always try to boot from them, which can be a problem when the hard drive fails. On some Toshiba notebooks, typing C at start-up forces the computer to boot from a CD. Other makers may offer alternative approaches so check your user manual.

Otherwise, the answer is to dig around in your computer's BIOS, the software stored in the hardware that runs before booting. There should be instructions on how to alter your BIOS so your computer will run from a CD in your user manual. If your computer shipped without a paper manual, print out the relevant pages for emergency reference.

Once you can boot from a CD, you have a number of options. Norton's SystemWorks 2005 Premier has a recovery boot CD that contains helpful tools to get a broken computer running again, but at $150 it's not cheap and some of its constituent programs are disappointing.

Bootdisk (www.bootdisk.com) offers a variety of "free" alternatives (the owner asks for $3 to keep the site running). You'll need a CD burner to make your own recovery disc.

You can always boot and reinstall from your official Windows CD in an emergency, but you better have decent data back-ups ready.

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

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