Post by Paul WylieBTW: Has anybody had any experience dealing with tech support or sales
since Symantec finished assimilating PQ back in December?
Oh yes, definitely. It S U C K S.
If that's not clear enough, give them a call. First you'll be
forced to endure their sales pitch for paid support over the
phone. Nothing you dial will blow that lengthy, slowly spoken
message away. And you will get every thime you call, no matter
what, unless you pay, period.
Then, try to get actual answers out of anyone there. For example
ask them what "save the disk's signature" or whatever it's really
called means? They won't know. It's supposed to save whatever
XP writes on your disk to authenticate your use of it, by the way...
Or let's say you have a disk with a couple partitions you're trying
to restore, but all you're getting is errors or something unrealable
("can't enumerate directory..") after attempting to do that. Again,
they will be worth less than no help at all. They will start
talking about 'fixmbr' and all that crap, when they should be telling
you to simply run chkdsk -r on the damn thing, which will move every-
thing into the same one partition and at least get you something you
can then work with (by fixing boot.ini to point to the right partition).
That only takes a couple more hours for about 5 gigs worth of files.
After a 2+ hour restore due to the 16-bit scsi path....
How did I find all this out? By feeding some well-chosen key words
into various search engines. And it only took me maybe a week or
so, since I know (knew...) just about nothing about windows (when I
started this little project).....
Then there's PQ's claim they support JAZ drives via the USB port.
But that does not work when booted from the DI cdrom. Then they
use MS's crappy boot code which doesn't support very many SCSI and
such adapters either. It was only by pure luck that I found the
MS-included "sparrow" driver will work with a certain Adaptec
pcmcia (16-bit) card, so there went another US$99 down the drain
to Adaptec for one of those. Luckily at least Adaptec still sells
the damn things - you will not find anything that old in a shop
these days..... Searchhing the web I did find one vendor on the
entire planet with one, and oddly enough he is only a few miles
away from me - but he wants US$179 for the damn thing. Probably
cause he's sat on it forever already, heh.....
And speaking of law enforcement and what they use, the ones I know
suggested trying Atlanta Data Recovery's utility (a commercial
product) which would have been fine if the damn disk didn't die
before I could get a complete copy of it that way. They also do
reverse cloning (starting from the end of the disk, not the top
of it) which is good on drives where there are read errors at
the beginning of the media. The only problem with this otherwise
excellent tool is it doesn't know abouut XP filesystems (or whatever
that's called..) so you can't use it to look at or fix directories
and that sort of stuff.
Finally, take a look at http://www.logicube.com for an interesting
hardware-only approach to all this...
Billy Y..