I’ve been spending some time lately researching how to fix Mike’s computer. He has a motherboard with RAID, so of course he was using it, as the boot disk. Then on the 13th or so, it got caught in a reboot loop due to an error on the disk. It took me a while to find the right software to figure out if the RAID was okay or just data corruption, and I had to scavenge a boot hard disk, floppy drive for the RAID drivers, and a CD drive from another computer we found in the closet.
It was quite an ordeal overall and I got it booting yesterday afternoon. Steve was amazed. I now know just enough to fix a similar problem, but not necessarily enough to fix all similar problems.
So I wanted to rearrange the data on the external USB drives that Mike has because he made arbitrary backups and it’s so hard to tell what’s what that they couldn’t have helped me if I needed them.
The big drive it boots from has got 750Gig used out of 950, and the 4 external drives are only 320Gig each and all have data on them. I got a program for finding duplicates and it churned quite a while with just a couple of directories. I finally just went manually through the Photos folders which contained pictures from 2000 through 2010, and deleted all the folders that were duplicated.
Then I saw that one of the small drives had only photos on it, and it held 2000 through 2008. Mike had put 2009 on a different drive because it didn’t fit. So I deleted 2001 through 2008 (2000 was minor and no duplicates), set it to copy 2001 through 2009 over to the small drive, and went to bed. This morning I checked it and there was no error message, and all the folders were copied! The bottom line is “Disk free space: 748Meg”. That’s less than one picture!
I find that truly amazing.
You are my new Wizardess !