[mooseman]

After reading through the forums I'm interested in created a good image of my PVHS2000 disk and burning it to CD-R for restoration purposes.


Fortunately (or not) I just received a refurbed unit back from repair. As my warranty will be finished in Nov 01 I feel the sooner I get this done the better.


I am running Windows 2000. Can Partition Magic and Norton Ghost be used to create a good image? Or what is the most correct method to use. I appologize in advance if this question has previously been answered.


Thanks

 

[lizard_boy]

partition magic/norton will not work due to the OS replay uses


in my sig is a link to the FAQ, which will answer many of your questions

 

[lizard_boy]

of course keep in mind as soon as you open the repaly to make the backup you void your warranty, that's why they call it Catch-22

 

[mooseman]

Duly noted on invalidating the Warranty. All I know is in about 4 weeks the warranty will expire. I know I'll never deal with Panasonic again if at all possible.


Now is the time to make a good image and burn it to CD as I JUST got the unit back (supposedly good).....


I'm printing out all docs now on the RTVPatch and Windows 2000 so it should be pretty straight forward to get my image burned. FINGERS CROSSED. Is there anything I should be aware of prior to actually performing the deed?

 

[lizard_boy]

no - as long as you're comfortable hooking up the replay drive to your PC there should be no problems - of course as long as you're in there why not drop in a 80 or 100GB drive and keep your current drive as a backup ??

 

[crowbert]

I think your main problem will be getting the image small enough to put on a CD-R. Even if you don't have any shows recorded, odds are that the blank space on the drive contains deleted shows. They may have installed a clean image on the drive, but they probably didn't bother to wipe the irrelevant data off, and you don't know which data is irrelevant.


With all the information determined about the disk layout, it shouldn't be too hard for someone to write a program that zeros out any unallocated space on the drive, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody has bothered yet.


But if you happen to be lucky and have zeros in all the unused spaces, then a good compression program should be able to fit the drive image on a CD-R.


Another option is to get a very small hard drive--something like 512M. There was a report of someone successfully using the upgrade proceedure to create a working image on a really small drive. The image of this drive could be saved on a CD-R. You should then be able to use this CD-R to create a fress working image on any hard drive that you would want to put into the system.

 

[greganderson9]

Actually, the first partition (the one you need to backup) only contains about 300Mb. Therefore, no problem storing on a CDR.



Good luck

Greg

 

[xyzzy]

Worked for me. I made an image file with the upgrade tools on my win2K box of P1 (and a little of P2) and burned that on my CDR. I kept the 20g drive in my PC after upgrading to 80g, so I could fiddle around with the extraction program and delve into the innards of the OS a bit more.


I also included the upgrade tools, the extraction tools and an extracted version of the image on the CDR.


This was last December when we were still working on the upgrade program with sean and toots and vbcoder and a couple of others.


Guess I waited too long to reply - avsforum deleted my old account name, and it was still available... hence the new-user tag.


X.

 

[Mikeyboy]

mooseman, By the time you read this post you will already have your disk image burned to cd and posssibly out on the black market. win2000 RTVPatch is terrific. You will not find any software easier to use. Many thanks to the people who made it. Job well done!!