House of Jorob

That Glow on the Horizon? That's my Dinner!

Put that fire extinguisher away.

I haven't started yet.

But I will.

I have to.

Grilling For Dummies showed up back around the December holidays.

I unwrapped it thinking it was something else.

Like a toy.

Or a game.

I didn't own a grille at the time.

There's a reason for that.

I suck at cooking over an open fire.

There's no burner knobs on a hibachi.

My idea of temperature control is not raising and lowering the food so its closer to the coals.

I burn marshmallows, for god's sake.

Put them on a stick.

Put the stick over the fire.

Torch.

Now I own a grille.

But I'm not playing around with charcoal.

No sir.

Got me a gas tank looks like Little Boy.

Only smaller.

And white.

With a valve.

I start burning things next weekend.

Meteor 4: The World of Warcraft Expansion

Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 ftw!

Jill got Wow's Wrath of the Lich King for Hanukkah.

Time to install it.

But first, relocate the entire WoW installation to the 1 TB Barracuda SATA drive I installed in there during the late October hard drive disaster.

Oops.

When I set up the big drive, it was as a destination for backup and recovery services during the reconstruction of the existing--but crashed--hard drive.

I never reconfigured the drive to behave as a normal storage device.

Hell, at the time I was just happy to have a recovered PC installation with all applications running correctly.

Okaaaaay.

Pulled out Acronis.

Brought up the partitioning tools.

Advanced, Manual Mode.

Located about 700 free Gigs and created a new partition out of it.

Moved and deleted a couple extra backups from the Time of Troubles.

Closed Acronis and restarted the PC.

All drives checked in.

With the correct drive letters.

Total time to repartition and clean up the files: 8 minutes.

I am never going to use Partition Magic again.

Evar.

Next: moved and upgraded Wow:

• Located the installed files under Program Files.
• Copied to their new drive space.
• Renamed the old folder.
• Repointed the desktop icon for WoW's launcher to the new folder space.
• Booted up Wow and tested the new location.
• Testing: mailed stuff between characters, deleted a character, created a new character, doublechecked maps and character locations on the maps, etc.
• Rebooted.
• Fired up the upgrade DVD
• Grinned as the autoloader found the new location for the files and installed Lich King to the right place.
• Updated the account with Blizzard during the installation.
• Fired up Wrath of the Lich King.
• Tested by playing the damn thing long enough to level a 1st level Blood Elf priest to sixth.

Total time for the entire migration and upgrade, including updating the account with Blizzard and the subsequent patching (which kicked off automatically upon the installation completion) to the Lich King files:

45 minutes.

As in, less than an hour.

Man.

I hope this is an omen for the rest of 2009.

Meteor 3: Return of the hard drive

I didn't want to lose the data.
It was all still there, according to my forensics.
I couldn't get at it, but it was there.

And so I've been working on recovering this stupid hard drive one byte at at time, it feels like. Since October 23, no less.
I'm almost done.

Logged on the DDO last night and left a joyous "halloo!" to my gaming buds.
Implicit in that sentence: Windows was back, the firewalls were up, network connection was restored, and the gaming applications were no longer corrupt.

Immediately afterward, I ran another backup of the rebuilt system. Overnight, because it takes a good 7 hours to back the whole thing up, full. (too many repairs to run incrementals during all of this.)

And tonight, I transferred 10 GB of free space from one partition over to the C: so that the WOW patch 3.01 would install.

Which was what started me off on this journey of recovery in the first place.........

It was a long way back--after the breakdowns I wrote of a couple posts back, I invested in a Barracuda SATA drive. 1 TB. No fooling around.

Installed it nice and simple. Bought a copy of Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 to manage my partioning. Immediately copied the old partition wreckage over to the new drive, and set that drive up as having active system partions. That failed, but it did tell me it couldn't find ntloader.

Ntloader?

WTF.

This meant that the original screwup was more than a simple drive letter switch. Portions of the OS got whacked.

OK. Copied the missing files over to the system partition. For kicks, copied them over the the cloned set on the new disk, too. Then hid the new disk's partitions, to force the old one to boot.

Nope.

OK, Un-hid the 2nd system partition, then booted again, using the bios selector to tell it which disk to boot from.

"Windows is corrupt. Bad or missing boot.ini file. Windows will boot from C:\windows."

Wow.

That brought up a badly broken Windows installation, but the drives were all there.

Hallelujah.

Rebooted to the Windows OS disk.

This time it detected the older Windows installation. Would I like to repair it?

Hell yes.

After an hour, rebooted yet again.

Up it came. Got to my system login.

Once in, Windows was kind of there. A crapload of rundll errors all over the screen. Not to mention the video was shot (easily fixed. The video controls were there, just reset to 16 bit)

All the drive letters were messed up again.

What's this? Symantec's Partition Magic is trying to finish the original botched job, according to yet another error message, buried beneath layers of rundll errors.

All the run-time errors made sense now--they were calling from the wrong drive letters. Again. But the Partition Magic thing was annoying.

Ok. Reboot to Acronis. All the partitions are lettered correctly at that level, its WINDOWS that's got it wrong. While I'm here, another backup.

Back to Windows, the next evening. User regedit and regedt32 to reorder the letters in Windows. Reboot.

Hooray--all the rundll errors go away as missing things start loading themselves again.

No. Wait. There's no network connectivity.

Damn.

Control panel--there's no network setup icon. There's the icon shell, but that's all. Looks like a little copy of the unidentified application icon. Trying to use it is fruitless--it just lays there.

Sigh.

Insert the Windows OS disk. It spins up and wants to install.

Well, okay.

Fortunately, running the OS disk while already in Windows is not a death sentence any more. This time, the disk installer located Windows, and decided it could upgrade what I had. Which to me meant repair. Good enough.

Reboot.

Yay! Panda upgrades it's signatures for the first time in three weeks.

We're back where we were three weeks ago. Another backup kicked off, then to bed......

As I said, that was last night.

Tonight, moved 10 G over to the system partition, using Acronis.

Reboot.

WTF.

Where's the network?

The network config icon is there, and it reports IP is up, and receiving. Just no sending.

Everything else in the house is online and talking to the Internet--it ain't the router.

Couple more reboots and some system inspection and I'm guessing the repartition fubarred something in Windows again.

Damn.

Reinstall Windows again, see if it helps.

It does.

And the WOW upgrade starts up.

And that's when I learn there've been two modifications to the patch that was already a Gig in size.

My god.

Lesson learned: Don't screw with the system partition. Take stuff over to other partitions instead of trying to enlarge the thing.

Update: The Meteor is still Glowing

Well, so much for it being easy.
It's still simple, but it ain't easy.
Here's what's up with the gaming box so far:
Using a second SATA-drive PC'a regedit32 to load the old drive's registry hive and editing it didn't work. When I put the old drive back in the original chassis, same problem.

As if the changes didn't take.

Ok. Round two.
Bring in a second SATA drive and install it on the gaming box.
Then copy the partitions off, loading them onto the 2nd disk.
Then copy them back to the original disk.
During one of these copies, retarget the partitions to the proper drive letters.
I got as far as the 2nd drive installation tonight.
Then I found I didn't have a 2nd power cable to the SATA drive in the packaging for the drive. Had the data cable, but no power. Actually it's not the cable, but the adapter/converter. Little two-inch thing that connects to the power supply line at one end and the back of the HDD at the other.

I have to find a partitioning utility, too. Not going anywhere near Partition Magic again.

The laptop's HDD is completely gone. Have to put a new one in there.
Another job, another day. First is to get the gaming box back up.

Jill is going WOW-nutz. Hasn't played since the system blew up.

Okay, who put the meteor under the couch?

So first my main gaming box blows up.

I kind of helped it--I was using Partition Magic and somehow something went wrong.

Really wrong.

One minute I was trying to move roughly 10GB worth of free space from one partition to another.

Next minute I was looking at a flashing cursor on the screen after the required reboot.

And more flashing cursor.

And more.

Oh boy.

After about 5 hours of forensics, I finally got a reading on the disk--my C and E drive letters had been changed.

Which means Windows has no idea where Windows is, basically.

I'm bringing the drive into the office, see if I can't get the drive letters back in play. It ain't easy to change the name of the system partition when things are working right, let alone when all blown to hell.

Incidentally, this is the machine I blog from. Lost a lot of posting time, there.

Today, my wife calls me at the office.

"Honey, what's it mean when the computer buzzes when you turn it on?"

Then she booted the laptop, and held the phone up close.

"clik-clik-clik-clik-clik."

I'm running SpinRite on that drive right now.

Deep scan, looking for damage.

Been running for one hour, thirty five minutes.

Time Remaining on the job: 2,589 hours, 50 minutes.

For real.

I think the drive is screwed.

Two machines down in less than five days.

Later on tonight I turn off the lights and look for radioactive waste under the couch.

Tomato Logic

Brandywine tomatoes need at least eight hours of full sun during their growing season, according to all the accomplished gardeners I know.

I have seven. 

Oops.

I could have sworn that I had more than eight back there, behind the house. In fact, I knew I had at least that many.

And I confirmed it when I pulled out my sunlight-chart.

Every three days I noted sunlight-lines and shadow. For a full growing season, just to be sure.

And there it was.

Clearly calculated.

Between eight and a half and nine hours, forty minutes.

Hah!

Um.

In 1996.

Funny how trees leaf out over the years.

The difference coming up short makes?

A ton of green tomatoes that stay green until the damn vines get tired and snap while snaking across the top of the cage.

Except for the beauties that are ripening NOW.

All three of them.

I have a fresh jar of mayo waiting in the fridge.