Fozzie got upgraded to Windows Vista recently, sort of by accident.

It all started with the fact that I had been running Vista within a virtual machine for awhile, and wanted to finally try running it on the base hardware to see if my beloved computer could handle the notoriously resource-hungry Vista. So, I started with a dual boot setup of XP and Vista. I was happy to discover that Vista actually perfectly fine on my computer, even getting a respectable 4.0 Windows Experience Index score.

The dual boot worked fine for awhile, with me occassionally going back and forth between the two OSes. But one day, I booted into XP and scandisk gave me a message during boot that one of the hard drives should be scanned. I skipped it. Then, the next time I booted into Vista, it gave me the same message. This time, I said "OK" and let it scan and fix the drive. Which proceeded to take on the order of 3 hours. During this time it processed through every file on my hard drive, saying they all had invalid security IDs and replacing them with default IDs. When it finished, Vista worked fine still, but XP was competely unusable, with tons of odd problems -- the taskbar has half it's normal height, open windows didn't appear on the taskbar, copy and paste didn't work, drag and drop didn't work, the sound system didn't work, and probably lots of other things I didn't get a chance to notice before giving up and booting back into Vista.

After some research online, I discovered that I was actually not the first person to have this problem. It appears to be somewhat common when dual-booting between Vista and XP. The problem lies with the NTFS file system. In NTFS, all files have security permissions (such as, everyone can read/write the file, or only a certain user can write it, and so on). Additionally, all files have owners, which is the user that has the ability to set the permissions on the file. Some permissions can refer to the owner indirectly, such as "only the owner can read this file, whoever the owner is right now".

Internally, the operating system associated an ID with each user of the system. So, say, the user "Greg" might be assigned the ID "1234". This association is store within the operating system. The ID is what is stored in the filesystem to identify the owner of a particular file. So, the file system may say that the owner of "test.txt" has an ID of "1234", and the operating system is then able to figure out that that means "Greg". You might now see where I'm going with this.

The problem appears to be that since the association is stored within the OS, the IDs that were set by XP don't mean anything to Vista, and vice versa. So, these appear to be invalid. So, the OS tries to fix them, which makes things work that operating system, but completely breaks things for the other operating system. Especially if the read/write permissions on the file referenced the owner -- the OS may now be unable to read its own files.

At least, this is what I can decipher from what I observed and what I read online. There must be a way to successfully boot between the two operating systems -- maybe the problem only starts to occur if you access files on one system drive from the other operating system? I don't know.

At any rate, I decided to wipe out both installations and just go with Vista, since it seemed to work fine on my computer. No data was lost (my data is kept on a separate physical drive, and has loose permissions set so that owenrship issue didn't really matter). However, I was hoping to soon do a similar dual-boot setup on Clementine to test it's Vista-readiness, but now am very reluctant to do so until I can figure out a solution.

For many many years now, I've had a tiered approach to backups. On one tier, I do automatic nightly backups from one hard drive to the other, protecting against drive failure and accidental deletion. On the next tier, I have done manual monthly backups to DVD-RWs (and CD-RWs before that), protecting against power surges, malware that may corrupt all attached disks, and physical damage to the computer. On the last tier, I do manual yearly backups to DVD-Rs, which are then stored off-site, protecting against fire, flood, and natural disaster. I pretty much have all my bases covered.

Except for the troublesome middle tier -- the DVD-RW backups. Since I do it every month maually, I don't want it to be too involved or take too much time. So, to cut down on the number of discs required I've usually just backed up my regular data, minus music and movies. That cuts it down a lot. But, even that subset has grown and recently has spanned 4 DVDs, which is just time-consuming to do every month. I had a similar problem several years ago when I used to back up to CDs, which prompted me to move to DVDs. Logically, I could progress now to Blu-Ray discs, but I think history is telling me that moving to new media will only buy me a couple years before I exceed the capacity again. It's a flawed process.

So, I recently decided to switch my middle-tier backups to a big external hard drive instead. This way, I can do a full backup every month (rather than a subset), and all I have to do is start the backup process, and then let it go. No switching of media. And it's important to note that this external hard drive will always be disconnected from the computer, sitting in a drawer, so it is as safe as the DVD-RWs. The whole point of this backup tier is to be easily accessible, but generally disconnected, and this still satisfies this requirement.

You can buy pre-made external hard drives, but after much research I decided that it was more cost-effective to build my own, not to mention that doing so means I can get more capacity, and in the future it is easier to upgrade just the drive if needed. Plus, I like building stuff myself.

For the external enclosure, I decided on a Rosewill Aluminum 3.5" SATA-to-USB enclosure. It's made of aluminum, which helps dissipate heat generated by the drive, and had overall very good reviews on NewEgg. External enclosures can be a hit-or-miss category, and this particular one seems to be a best-of-breed component.

For the hard drive itself, there was a lot of drama. I had initially decided on a 500GB Seagate drive. I've always been a big fan of Seagate, historically they seem to make the highest-quality drives. However, in the last month or so they've been having many firmware issues with a particular subset of their drives, and this 500GB model was within that subset. As I was deciding on hard drives, Seagate had yet to resolve the issues they were having with this drive. So, I decided on a 320GB Seagate model, which was unaffected by the firmware issue. However, looking at the reviews on NewEgg, an amazing 40% of the reviews were 1-star, and they all were experiencing the same issues -- drive completely dies within 2 months or so. You expect some reasonable failure rate -- maybe 5% -- but having 40% of reviewers report failure is amazing. So, that drive was out.

I finally decided on a 640GB Western Digital drive, which actually cost the same as the 320GB Seagate. It's been a long time since I've owned a Western Digital drive, but they really seemed like the best option right now. Maybe they will become the new Seagate in terms of reliability, or maybe Seagate will recover from this.

At any rate, the external hard drive assembled very easily, and seems to be working great so far. I've added a new page to this site of "Shared Resources", which allows me to show and track components which aren't really a part of any one computer, but are shared amongst several, such as this drive.