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The Hard Drive Chronicles

The saga continues. The new Hitachi 500 gb drive tests fine. The old 60 gb drive has been thoroughly exercised with chkdsk /f /r. Clonezilla failed to make the clone off the image I created previously so I tried a disk to disk clone and Clonezilla failed there too. Even ntfsclone –rescue bombs on the bad sector. I can still see all the data on the 60 gb hard drive so I’m mounting it in my Linux box and will copy everything from the hard drive to a backup drive. Next step will be a last ditch attempt using Ghost and then finally I will simply reinstall Windows and my critical applications on the 500 GB hard drive. This ends today.

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Bush Hogging

I own a John Deere weed eater. They used to sell a variety of snap on parts for it like a chainsaw extension, edger and so forth. I never bought any. Last time I was at the John Deere store the sales person responded with surprise, "Are you sure it’s a John Deere?" Apparently they got out of that business a long time ago.

My yard is overgrown. I have about an acre and the brush is shoulder high in places. Using a machete is slow going and painful. Using a lawn mower guarantees bent blades. Renting a bush hog for the weekend has been my desire but is a bit costly and just hasn’t happened. I need to be able to take brief breaks on the yard and pull this down over time. The heavy duty trim line just isn’t working out. For every 5 feet of brush I knock down I have to spend 5 minutes fidgeting with the line or reloading the spool.

The solution? A brush blade! These are about $25 if I can find one which I doubt I could today. Instead, I believe my Dremel and bench grinder are going to help me repurpose a rotary saw or table saw blade into a wicked brush destroying weapon. If I do this correctly, I won’t end up with shards of metal thrown at high speeds into my ankles and the hill out back will have a better chance of being used for sledding this winter.

Read more at Homeowner stupidity, and Modified weed eater, and Redneck Lawncare Update.

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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