Solo Technology

Was at a client/friend’s place last night. Simple job that should’ve had me gone within an hour or two went south quickly and, after 3 hours, we plan to finish up Sunday afternoon.

The situation: She frequently works from her home office. The computer there is well over 6 years old and it’s been a few years since the last reload of Windows XP. It had a “partial reload” after her husband had an “oopsie” 2 years ago (don’t ask, long sad story!) but its been begging for a full refresh recently. However… when you look at the time involved to backup, format and reload and restore, suddenly 4 or so hours of labor on a machine that is already six’ish years old doesn’t seem quite as wise as it should. After talking it over last weekend, I helped her pick out and order a new PC. Nice little “name brand” with a dual core, 1GB ram, 250GB SATA drive, Radeon graphics, the works. Should easily get another 6 years out of it and the price was really quite decent.

My plan was to show up last night and run XP’s File and Settings Transfer Wizard. Client already has a nice big 80GB external USB drive, so I really didn’t think this would be a problem… I’ve had good luck with F.a.S.T the last few of these jobs I’ve done.

So where did I mess up right off the bat?

1. I made invalid assumptions about how much data we were moving. F.a.S.T. makes a compressed archive to move from old to new machine. Her archive is well over 6GB. Make a 6GB archive an a 1GHz machine some time…
2. That external USB drive? Sure, it supports USB2. But the old computer doesn’t. Gah. Slow transfers.

Ok, those are things I learned after the fact. Before I even got to those revelations, I was already having problems.

First go around with F.a.S.T. I told it to put the data on the USB drive. About 5 minutes in, XP pops up a little task tray balloon error with something about “delayed write.” To be honest, we were chatting, I just shrugged it off with a mental note to self to look into that later. Well, 10 minutes later I get another message. I look closer. Oh, Delayed Write is failing on the USB drive! Glance at it in explorer and observe that after 15 minutes we have zero data on the drive. Yep, it’s completely failing on every write attempt.

Take Two: This time I figure I’ll write the F.a.S.T. archive to the local drive and worry about moving it later. Light it up, walk away to de-crapify the new PC. Come back 45 minutes later and realize the damn wizard is grabbing all the stuff ON the USB drive first (an older copy of My Documents). *sigh*

Take Three: Disconnect USB drive. Run F.a.S.T. and 90 minutes later it finishes. yay!

Now what? Well, let’s try to copy it to the USB Drive. No dice, write delay errors again. Pop open the Device manager and poke around properties for USB drive but didn’t see anything useful. Gave a deep sigh and started to copy the archive over the wi-fi network (G) to her laptop. 54mbits my impatient butt! Once we realized that was going to take close to two hours we called it a night. Oh yeah, that was another kick in the pants: She’s on DSL and the provided router has ONE Ethernet port and a built-in wireless access point. So I couldn’t even transfer the stuff at Ethernet speeds.

The good news is, I think I can address the USB issues. I’ve been looking at my Device Manager (I also have a USB hard drive) and just realized the disk itself shows up under the Disk Drives section. Under the Policies tab I see interesting settings that I, for some reason, have never noticed before…

I’m going to have to check and look at how her drive is set when I go back over tomorrow. I wonder if it got set to “Optimize for Performance” for some reason? That would explain things (maybe?).

One Response to “Tribulations of Migrating Data”

1. Sam on September 28th, 2006 5:10 am
   

   I’ve gotten the delayed write fail with ‘Optimize for performance’. Learned the hard way ;’) I suspect some performance-enhancing programs can toggle that as well (Surprise!).

Leave a Reply