HD Crash general procedure questions

[Norm]

Appreciate help with some general questions on how to operate in an emergency and get back to normal operations.

 

Experienced my first hard drive crash on a primary drive last night. :-( I think it is gone though some newsgroup helpers think it may be something called the IDE host adaptor. So I'm continuing to try to figure that out.

 

 

In the meantime, I'm now running on my Retrospect Duplicate. It is on a partition on one of my external FW drives.

 

My system:

Powerbook G4 Ti

OS X 10.4.8

Retrospect 6.1.126

2 External FW drives

 

I would appreciate any tips from the experts as to how to best get back to "normal" operations. Some questions:

 

1. I have a second external FW drive that I'll now use for the destination for both Retro Duplicates and Retro Backups. Any problems running backups/duplicates from one FW drive to the other on the same FW chain?

 

2. When I went to set up the backup script for this, listed under the name of the boot partition were two folders named: sdEq.htm and sdEqOt.htm. What would they be? The boot partition is the Retrospect Duplicate on one of the external partitions.

 

3. I'm now running from the Duplicate. Are there any "issues" to be aware of in running from a Retro Duplicate on a FW hard drive partition? All seems OK. I lost one day of work but I guess I should be pleased that I have that recent a Duplicate to be back in operation.

 

4. When I install a new hard drive, I plan to Duplicate from the current boot FW partition as the source (it was the Duplicate from my internal drive) to my new internal drive. Anything special I need to do to be back in normal operations at that point?

 

5. When I do a Restart, there is an error message "Disk inserted was not readable" at the very end of the startup. I select the Ignore option (it also lists Initialize and Eject) and all seems OK. Any concerns with this?

 

6. And since this crash happened, I can't Restart and hold the Option key and get a list of all the bootable volumes/folders. Just shows the restart and continue arrows. I finally got around it by using the Tiger DVD to find and select the FW partition with the Duplicate. Any thoughts as to why?

 

 

Thank you very, very much. Appreciate the help