Monthly Archive for November, 2003

More coming

Published on November 15, 2003 in General. 0 Comments

More on my Weekend Tale of Woe and Data Loss to come – I just have to get through two amazingly painful midterms first. So it’ll likely be Thursday Night before I write again.

I should point out that should you ever have a prof who doesn’t hand out a course outline or otherwise make one available, doesn’t give you back your first midterm before the second one is due to be written, only gives you one week’s notice of the date for the second midterm, doesn’t put up the website he’s been promising since the first week of classes, and does a slew of other things that have a negative impact on your learning… you should find out who to complain to, and complain to them. We should have done this weeks ago.

The Lost Weekend

Published on November 10, 2003 in Tech. 0 Comments

Gather round, ye cyberspace adventurer, and hear my tale of woe. ‘Tis a tale of Windows install CDs, corrupted MFTs, USB memory keys, Minority Report, and far too much “borrowed” Halloween candy.

Let’s start at the beginning, a time called…

Friday Night

I decide that the time has come to replace Linux with Windows fully, for reasons detailed in a previous post. I commence backing up my Linux home directory into a massive .tar.bz2 file on my FAT32 patition

Saturday Morning

I locate some partitioning tools and make sure that the backup file is intact. I then spend several hours trying to get up the nerve to erase the Linux partition.

Saturday Afternoon

I delete the Linux partition, and expand the FAT32 documents partition to take up the extra space. I start backing up personal stuff from the NTFS WinXP partition to the FAT32 partition, so I can reformat the NTFS partition (Windows has been acting up a fair bit) lately.

Reinstalling XP, I want to reformat the partition. I wind up deleting the partition and creating it again, which the Windows installer wants to make a Logical partition (this becomes important later). Install and go.

I start installing software, and convert the FAT32 partition to NTFS for later merging (as is the entire plan). I also notice that the main partition is not a primary partition, and convert it.

Things go downhill from there.

Saturday Evening

Conversion finishes OK, and I notice that the machine no longer boots nicely. Why? Because of my partition changes, the boot.ini file – which lives on the former FAT32 partition – points to the wrong partition for Windows to be on.

Given that Windows is really the only O/S that can write to NTFS partitions, this makes correcting the problem difficult. NOTE TO LONGHORN DEVELOPERS: Putting a text editor in the Windows recovery console would be REALLY helpful.

I figure out that the Windows Recovery console supports USB memory keys. Copy the boot.ini file over to that, edit it on another machine, and copy it back. All is well.

Get into Partition Magic, and set it to merge and walk away as it reboots to do so.

I get back just in time to see Partition Magic dump core, and boot into Windows. I check, and my Documents drive is NOT READABLE.

To be continued.

To XP or not to XP…

Published on November 5, 2003 in General. 0 Comments

I’ve been a Linux-type guy for about a year now, and it’s been really good. Evolution is a great great GREAT email and contact and calendar app, Mozilla is a kick-ass browser, GAIM is acceptable for IM, and OpenOffice.org is all I need and more for office stuff.

Not to mention the fact that using the I’m-on-Linux-so-I-can’t-use-the-Borland-compiler thing has saved me on multiple programming assignments (the TAs mark assignments using the Borland compiler, which is crap).

However, as of late I’ve been using Windows a lot more. Reasons?

  • Better battery life Even though Red Hat added Notebook Mode with Severn, it doesn’t get activated much, so the hard drive goes almost full tilt, full time. So I can get about 3 hours in Linux on my brand-new battery, versus about 5 in Windows (not doing anything overly disk intensive)
  • Suspend and Hibernate These help with battery even more, since I can just hibernate the machine between classes and save about 10 minutes of power every hour – without having to wait for the system to start.
  • Starts and shuts down faster
  • Better .NET support – and since I’m joining the Microsoft .NET Student Community program to try and earn me another XBox or a wireless mouse or something, this will be an issue.
  • More office software – because OpenOffice.org can’t read everything
  • Better PIC tools
  • Better WiFi support – not having to manually change profiles, letting me see what networks are available… *joy*

There are more reasons to switch back, but you get the idea – Linux basically isn’t made for running on laptops (especially mine, damnable Trident video chip…). The best thing is, this can be a basically zero-cost switchover with respect to changing software – since Evo stores things in fairly standard file formats, and since I’ve switched all of my email over to IMAP, and since cygwin can give me any software I need, basically… I’ll be set.

The only question is, when do I reformat and start anew? I mean, this XP install has rather gone to shit, and I need to repartition anyways.

Blast from yonder past

Published on November 2, 2003 in General. 0 Comments

Weird day – in the past 24 hours, I’ve talked to the following old High School-type people:

  • Ryan T (c’mon, there were like 5 in my graduating class)
  • Andree-Anne
  • Michelle
  • Rudie
  • Chris J.
  • Sam
  • Ken

This is a record – I haven’t really talked to all of them in a single day since I was IN high school.