Everybody Needs a "Plan B"

It's been a heck of a week! It started out pretty darned bad and ended in a rush! You may or may not know it (or even care), but the Johnny Manziel led Aggies kicked a field goal with time expiring to win a shootout vs. Ole' Miss. in Oxford, while earlier that day, my other school Texas Tech survived a scare at home over the Iowa State Cylones: Go TTU Kingsberrys....I mean Raiders! Anyway, back to business (literally). I've talked about a commercial client I have several times that's in kind of a bad position technology-wise. 

At the point where I was introduced to them, they had computer problems, with 2 working machines, 1 of which was a stand-alone machine dedicated to running a cutting machine (more on that later). Other than the owners Sony laptop that he often carried for work, their communications with the outside world consisted of landline telephones and one of these. An old PIII, Gateway (before the Acer buyout) computer. The picture shows a mid-tower, and theirs was the full-tower version, but you get the idea. Most people remember these things from the "Cow-box" people. They weighed a ton, and were built for bear outta good-ol' American steel. The poor thing was limping along on Windows XP/SP3, with 512Mb of RAM (BIOS limitation)! Ultimately, I built them an inexpensive (about $500, $600 including 20" Dell Ultrasharp Monitor), Quad Core machine, running Windows 7. They are very happy with it. 

A few months later, I took an old Dell Dimension 3000 machine that was given to me, by an old friend and co-worker. Added RAM, reloaded the Windows XPP OS and now they have a back-up in the back office. I even got them an external HDD so they could back up their critical files! Things were going along pretty well, but I knew that the machine in the back might be an Achille's heel for them. After convincing them to let me clone the HDD onto another drive, I thought we were in good shape.

This company makes custom gaskets. Most of them are stamped using metal die cutters, but anything really sophisticated is sent to them via a CAD drawing and that's put onto a computer controlled water jet cutter that's hooked up to it's own dedicated PC. This PC is old, not PIII mind you, but old never-the-less.....Athlon XP 2200+! So I went over one after noon and cloned the drive from it. They were working on something that day and didn't have time for me to test the HDD so we just put it away. A couple of months later (last week), I got a call that said that they could test it now, but could do it themselves so I didn't need to come down. Just send some instructions. Yup; you guessed it! The instructions were ignored and they disconnected pretty much everything inside the case and when it was connected back, nothing happened.......Uh, Oh. To make a long story short, apparently, not only were there two different on/off wires (One from the console cabinet panel), but apparently there were 2 drives as well. You see, what they didn't tell me was that there had been a previous issue, and the machine had been rebuilt by the manufacturer, but they left the old (bad) drive in the case. We had been connecting to that one and trying to make it work. So, I actually repaired and cloned THAT drive, so they ended up with the old system from several years ago! Guess who got to run over there to reconnect the new (good) drive back to get them going again!?! After all was said and done, I made 2 clones of that drive to make sure we have a back-up!