On Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:55:32 +0100, wrote:

On 25 Jul,
"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

The HD in my Toppy died, so I decided to replace all the PSU caps at the
same time - they weren't too bad but the 3.3v rail was a bit low. That
went fine.

Bought a new 500GB PATA HD off Ebay, and it didn't like the Toppy. Had
been warned this could happen.

The workshop desktop PC - that doesn't get much use - was assembled by me
and has two IDE HDs of about the same age as the Toppy, and neither of
them even remotely full, so I decided to try one in it. Copied everything
on F onto C, and removed F.

Bet you're ahead of me. I'd actually removed C, plonked it in the Toppy
and formatted it...

BTDTGTTS

Actually was on a DTT training course just before I retired. I copied
the (generic) firmware from the /replacement/ unit into the good unit.

Glad it wasn't on a live system, which would have taken hours to correct, and
/much/ longer to explain away later.

At least you should have been able to restore (it wasn't much used) from
installation discs and the latest backups (you do *do* backups?)

Brought home new base unit, removed from packaging, packed up old
unit, took to skip for recycling and arrived just in time to fling the
lot in as the skip was being dragged out. Came home and stood staring,
wallet broken, at the original base unit sitting in it's cubby hole,
all smug and jaunty looking....