Ye Olde Rad Blog II

Installed Norton Ghost 12 last night, and (successfully!) created my first Windows-based back-up image (which Symantec terms a Recovery Point) .. of my laptop's system drive .. to a 500-gig Seagate external USB drive (from Newegg).

If you've been Radified for any length of time, you know how we stress the importance of backing-up your hard drive with a cloning program, such as Ghost.

The Rad Community forums have become the de facto Ghost support forums on the Web, frequented by people smarter than me, who graciously lend their experience.

We even have one of the program's original developers stopping by (from New Zealand), sharing insights, along with other wizards, who all possess their particular niche of expertise.

I've been pooh-pooh'ing the notion of Windows-based back-up images ever since Ghost 9.0 first arrived on the scene (for reasons detailed > here),..

.. but figure it's time to join the 21st century, and gather some experience with these newfangled (Windows-based) imaging tools.

Been upgrading my web master skills recently, to include proficiency with HTML, XHTML, CSS & Dreamweaver. I'd also like to become familiar with JavaScript, PHP & SQL-based databases, such as MySQL.

Much of my web skills to date have been acquired on an ad hoc basis, learning only what I've needed to know .. to accomplish a particular result/effect. I've simply not been very interested in learning the details of web mastery.

Yet the Internet (or the Web, I should say) remains one of mankind's coolest inventions. And the web - as you know - is comprised, primarily, of web pages. So skills in this area might allow me to take better advantage of (indulge myself in) this evolving technology.

None of these skills, mind you, are particularly difficult to learn. It's not rocket science, but there *is* much material involved.

Like most people, I learn best by doing .. by having a project to which I can apply my new skills.

You might recall I've begun working on a new Guide to Norton Ghost, based on Ghost 12 (Rad NG12). This new guide will be layed out with a CSS-based (table-less) 3-column liquid/fluid design (with header & footer), which I've selected from a variety of pre-coded templates available in Dreamweaver.

16.December.2007 » Restored my first Ghost 12 image today. (It worked!) You might recall the problems I've been having with the DC input jack on my laptop.

Went to dinner last night and caught a movie. When I returned, the laptop was dead. (Battery completely drained). Normally I shut the lid when/if I won't be using it for a while. Could kick myself for letting it run unattended.

Was able to restore a/c power by jiggling the cable, but the laptop still wouldn't boot. What a horrible feeling (as you know). None of my tricks worked. Even after the battery was fully charged (and I crossed my fingers and said a prayer) » no dice.

Last Known Good config was » no good. Couldn't even boot into safe mode. That's when I knew it was bad.

Still don't know what went wrong. I mean, a dead battery shouldn't prevent your laptop from booting (once power is restored).

But I could load drivers in safe mode (before it would blue-screen and auto-reboot), so I knew the drive itself was accessible (sign of hope) .. cuz I thought I heard it making funny noises earlier.