I use a USB - external caddy, rather than docking station - a lot, and it's probably the best tool I ever bought. But I use it mostly for recovering data from elderly hard drives: I've had more trouble with failed computers than with failed disks.

Most recently I was working on a machine which wouldn't boot any which way - I got a flash of blue screen implying a BSOD, but it was set to retry immediately. Nothing else worked - safe mode, startup repair, system restore - but the data I needed was intact on the disks.

I don't think I'd use it for OS installation. Apart from making a slow process very much slower (mine is 'only' USB 2.0), every OS installation is different because it's tailored to the BIOS, hardware, and drivers present in the destination machine. Unless you have local access to another machine from the same batch, I think pre-preparing an OS disk off site is likely to be more trouble than it's worth. The quickest way is to buy hardware with OEM restore disks with drivers that match the manufacturer's hardware at build time.

I do have both a Iomega 500 GB disk coming with a small USB interface, and also an external 200 GB disk with an IDE interface,
which could have needed the booting option, but if it for once could be just possible, it could still end up being software for such a thing.

The Samsung mobile phone could also be rooted, and here it became software for this available right now, but the downloads did not work out yesterday.

You might try disk cloning s/w as a periodic backup option for each machine. An extra hard drive doesn't cost all that much. I had to do it on one of my crunchers because I stupidly used too small a hdd, and it was really easy: 1) attach the target (for the clone) disk 2) run the s/w to copy the system disk to it 3) swap the old system disk for the clone.

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A couple of my machines at a remote location have a dead hard drive. It would suit me to buy two new drives and work on them at home with the time consuming stuff. E.g. format, install Win 7, Boinc, Seti, Av etc.

If I bought a USB docking station for the drives could I do this from another working computer?

Thanks for any help.

CS

A long time ago I studied the process where you could create an install image for Windows that would deal with slightly hardware by loading different drivers. It was/is designed for mass installs. I have no doubt it is possible. But I think the time consumed setting it up for a couple of machines might exceed the time needed to simply install the machines in parallel using flash drives as the media.

Tom

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association).

'Tis easy to run a "LiveCD" Linux distro from whatever USB media...

You can also run a no-disk-drive remote system remotely provided you have the option to boot via pxe (or have "remote hands" to plug in a USB stick and reboot, or if you have a remote KVM/IPMI to those systems to attach remote media)...

Good luck!


Happy cool crunchin',
Martin

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