So, I finally got around to setting up my systems with some backups. My wife picked up a couple new drives from Fry's for me that were on sale, one of which was a Western Digital 120GB drive. It wasn't until I went to install it that I noticed the drive had been re-packaged into the box it was in. It was shrink-wrapped and was taped up where the packaging had been previously opened. The drive inside had no anti-static bag around it, and the IDE cable was hanging out of a plastic bag that had been torn open. When I installed the drive into my computer, I noticed it was formatted and had an operating system installed on it!

Fry's sold me a used drive!

So, now I have to package it all back up and take it back to Fry's and make them exchange it for a new one. What a foible! I can't wait to see how much trouble we have getting the rebate check for the thing in the next few months.

Anyway, I now have the other drive hooked up (a 250GB drive) just so I can experiment with some data recovery software and procedures. I am creating an image copy of my system drive to see if I can just pull out the original system drive and plug in the backup drive and reboot successfully. Once I determine that that works, then I can go to Fry's and get the drive exchanged, then resume my efforts to get this backup stuff together. And I can also put the 250GB drive into the other computer that we are going to use as our central backup server. I have some backup software that I am going to install on all the computers on the LAN that will automatically back up our files over the network at night while we're sleeping. 250GB ought to last us a little while (I'm not going to put my video stuff on there).

If it's not one thing, it's another!