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The Hard Drive Chronicles Continue…

My RMA’d Hitachi 500 GB hard drive was received by Newegg and the replacement drive arrived today. This time they packaged it with great care with the drive wrapped in bubble wrap in a box that was wrapped in crumpled papers within another box. I feel a little like they may have seen my recent picture of their previous package. Using Hitachi’s tools (a live CD) I have inspected the drive and it passes all tests. Now I am using Clonezilla to restore the image of the 60 GB drive that has been my life blood for much of the past decade. Fingers crossed I can resume working in my dungeon in a few hours and my son won’t have to keep loaning me his laptop. (that laptop has spoiled me…I want one!)

Update: Fail. The dreaded 89%. I have access to the data. Nothing is really lost. I’m just faced with reinstalling Windows and a enormous number of applications.

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Windows won’t boot past the logo

In trying to clone my 60 gb hard drive to a 500 gb hard drive, I ran some utilities on the 60 gb hard drive to fix bad sectors and find missing data. Apparently in the process, I damaged something in Windows. Right now the drive will not boot beyond the blue screen with the Windows XP logo in regular mode nor in safe mode. I’m documenting my steps here because the usual troubleshooting steps have failed and I need to make sure I’m not repeating the same steps twice. Continue reading Windows won’t boot past the logo

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My husband sense is tingling


I know..it could be that Cathy is bitter over yesterday’s overwhelming lack of specialness. But that’s not it. Something is amiss. Usually this means I am forgetting a commitment. Or there is something important to the Venusian that is not important to the Martian except for the fact that it is important to the Venusian therefore it very well better be important to the Martian except that the Martian cannot figure out what that thing is because it isn’t important to the Martian, yet.