Ask DACS - June 2006
Bruce Preston, Moderator

We welcome questions from the floor at the start of our General Meetings. In addition, members who are not able to attend the General Meeting may submit questions to askdacs@dacs.org. We will ask the question for you and post the reply in DACS.ORG. Please provide as much information as possible since we can’t probe during the session.

Q. I have a rather old computer (Pentium II era) that I’d like to dispose of. Are any organizations making use of such machines? Is there an environmentally-responsible way to dispose of it?

A. That machine’s processor (and by implication, the other components) does not meet the minimum requirements for the machines that DACS recycles. There might be some salvageable components (modem, video card, network adapter, floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, etc.) but even those are probably very out-dated. It was suggested that you see Charlie out in the lobby at the registration desk as he runs the re-build program. While he may not be able to make use of the parts, he should be able to tell you how to dispose of them.

Q. Related question – How do I insure that the information on the hard drive can not be read?

A. We are going to guess that the hard drive is not worth installing in another machine because it is probably comparatively low capacity—today you would be hard-pressed to find a drive of less than 120 GB. So the best way to insure that it isn’t read would be to remove it from the machine. Having done that, you could do several things: (a) drop it several stories onto a concrete slab; (b) get out your trusty ¼” electric drill and drill through the drive a couple of times; (c) open up the drive and expose the platters. The drive is hermetically sealed, and normally opened only in clean-room conditions. Just opening it in a non-clean-room environment will probably introduce enough contamination to make the drive unusable. And if you ever took a clock apart, you might be interested in seeing the insides of a drive.

Q. I have a small business, three peer-to-peer networked machines – all Macs. One of the machines is running a File-Maker Pro database. I’d like to be able to share it with the other machines, and also back it up. Any suggestions?

A. After much discussion of alternatives, it was suggested that you get an external Firewire drive, and that you then mount it to mirror the drive in the machine that is currently hosting the database application. You can set up a RAID system where your primary drive is internal to the Mac, and the other drive in the RAID system is accessed via Firewire.

Q. I am using Pinnacle Studio 10.5. After about 40 minutes or so into the video, the audio is out-of-synch with the video. During preview it appears to be OK; only after I create the video does it go bad. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to fix it?

A. It was suggested that you break the video into component ‘clips’ or ‘chapters’ so that each time a chapter starts the baseline of the audio is re-synchronized.

Q. Does anyone have any experience, good or bad, with data recovery services? I have a drive that the machine recognizes as being present, but Windows can not see the drive.
A. One of our members recommended OnTrack - http://www.ontrack.com.

In some cases they are able to perform the recovery via a remote connection. If the machine can’t be booted, etc., then the drive has to be sent for recovery. If the drive media hasn’t been damaged (i.e. head crash which scored the platters) then data can usually be recovered by rebuilding the drive. Be aware that this can be a time-consuming and expensive proposition. Another member related that a drive was damaged by a severe power surge. Examination of the circuit board on the drive revealed a chip with a ‘blister’ on it. An identical drive was found on eBay (identical size and firmware “Rev Level” markings on the circuit board.) The circuit board was removed from the eBay drive and placed on the damaged drive and the drive was brought back to operating condition. Data was immediately copied to a new drive.

Bruce Preston is president of West Mountain Systems, a consultancy in Ridgefield, CT specializing in database applications. A DACS director, Bruce also leads the Access SIG. Members may send tech queries to Bruce at askdacs@dacs.org.