by DONALD CALLOWAY
Posted September 26, 2009; The Chronicler’s Web
CLARKSBURG, WV — I’ve been using the Clickfree Model HD225 Automatic Backup storage device from Storage Appliance Corp. for a couple of years now and just love the convenience of being able to simply plug in the device to my Windows PCs’ USB port and let the device take care of the backing up all my important files on all my computers running Windows Vista Home Premium. It couldn’t be easier using the device to safely store over 400 different file types, including emails and photos, for retrieval and reloading in the event of a dreaded system hard drive crash.
All was well until about 5 months ago when my Clickfree device suddenly and inexplicably stopped functioning as expected when I plugged it in to one of my desktop PCs. Instead of booting up automatically and starting the search for files to backup as usual, the device merely presented a Windows explorer view of the devices storage and system drives used to perform the backup. For months I tried in vain to figure out on my own why my Clickfree worked just fine on all my other PCs except my desktop with the problem. After getting nowhere, I enlisted the help of a Clickfree support technician. He worked with me on the phone for over an hour, telling me that I must have a problem with my PC. An interesting aspect of the issue I was having was the Clickfree technician had me execute a Disk Management view of my system with the Clickfree device plugged in and was baffled as to why my Clickfree system drive properties showed it as an HFS file system rather than the usual CDFS file system. Incidentally, the HFS file system is used by linux systems and the Mac from Apple Macintosh. Frustrated even further, I enlisted the help of my brother who is a computer technician with a master’s degree in IT. He asked if I had ever dual-booted Linux on my PC with the problem, and I told him that I had. He suspected the problem may be due to the linux partition still residing on the hard drive. He suspected the Clickfree device (which can backup both PCs and Mac’s) might be seeing that partition and defaulting to Mac rather than PC backup mode. So, I deleted the linux partition and incorporated the unallocated disk space to my system’s C:/ drive, and finally fixed the Vista boot image. All that work turned out for naught as the problem still persisted. (more…)
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