The Daily Detritus.....
Mar. 18th, 2004 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poltr1R and I took M to the doctor this morning, She has strep throat. So I stayed home with her today while R went to work. And we watched the Disney Channel, the Weather Channel, and the tail end of some NCAA basketball games.
No tasks on the horizon for me, job-wise. Methinks it's time to update my skill set and get the resume Out There. Can anyone recommend a good book on learning Java and Visual Basic for Applications (also known as "VBA")?
Computerfest and Millennicon are on the same weekend this year. I guess neither group was aware of this shuduling gaffe, or the overlap between computer geeks and SF fans is smaller than I think. I any event, I'm not going to either one.
Good news on the computer front! On Tuesday night, thanks to a well-worded query on Ask Jeeves, I found the website of Runtime Software, which has a product called GetDataBack, that can read the contents on a hard drive on a low level. (Supposedly, Symantec's Norton Disk Doctor can do this too, but the damaged drive has to be the primary hard drive in the system. The failed drive was a secondary drive, and my copy of Norton SystemWorks is wedged. The files are there, but they're not in the registry, and when I try to uninstall, it says it can't.) I tried it out, and liked it so much I bought it. (It's initially shareware, but to get files, you'll need to purchase it online.)
The next day (Wednesday), I ran it on all three partitions of the failed hard drive, and was able to retrieve nearly everything. Unfortunately, I couldn't recover the email I received between 2/15 and 2/26, but according to the file modification dates, the email was never there to begin with. C'est la guerre. That afternoon, I bought an external drive enclosure for the failed hard drive, ran FDISK and FORMAT on it, and it's ready to use as a drive for my backups. (And I can still read many of the old files on this disk using GetDataBack, until I start writing files to it.)
The next step is to either restore my C drive from the copy from the bad drive (and figure out how to do this from within Windows, since the backup is on an external drive, which DOS probably won't recognize), or laboriously reinstall everything, piece by piece. But first, I need to finish my taxes because I don't want to have to go through the bother of installing TurboTax again, and waiting an hour for the updates to download.
No tasks on the horizon for me, job-wise. Methinks it's time to update my skill set and get the resume Out There. Can anyone recommend a good book on learning Java and Visual Basic for Applications (also known as "VBA")?
Computerfest and Millennicon are on the same weekend this year. I guess neither group was aware of this shuduling gaffe, or the overlap between computer geeks and SF fans is smaller than I think. I any event, I'm not going to either one.
Good news on the computer front! On Tuesday night, thanks to a well-worded query on Ask Jeeves, I found the website of Runtime Software, which has a product called GetDataBack, that can read the contents on a hard drive on a low level. (Supposedly, Symantec's Norton Disk Doctor can do this too, but the damaged drive has to be the primary hard drive in the system. The failed drive was a secondary drive, and my copy of Norton SystemWorks is wedged. The files are there, but they're not in the registry, and when I try to uninstall, it says it can't.) I tried it out, and liked it so much I bought it. (It's initially shareware, but to get files, you'll need to purchase it online.)
The next day (Wednesday), I ran it on all three partitions of the failed hard drive, and was able to retrieve nearly everything. Unfortunately, I couldn't recover the email I received between 2/15 and 2/26, but according to the file modification dates, the email was never there to begin with. C'est la guerre. That afternoon, I bought an external drive enclosure for the failed hard drive, ran FDISK and FORMAT on it, and it's ready to use as a drive for my backups. (And I can still read many of the old files on this disk using GetDataBack, until I start writing files to it.)
The next step is to either restore my C drive from the copy from the bad drive (and figure out how to do this from within Windows, since the backup is on an external drive, which DOS probably won't recognize), or laboriously reinstall everything, piece by piece. But first, I need to finish my taxes because I don't want to have to go through the bother of installing TurboTax again, and waiting an hour for the updates to download.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-19 07:53 pm (UTC)You may be happy to know that this year's version doesn't have the awful "if you install this on a second machine, you have to purchase a license" software that last year's version had. (And there was Much Rejoicing.)
I think my dad had his done by February 1. (He can't stand that I wait until the last minute.) And he still does his the Old-Fashioned Way (i.e. paper). And he's still waiting for his refund check.
Unfortunately, once the tax perparation season is over, you'll have another CD in your collection of Obsolete Software and AOL Disks.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-23 08:22 am (UTC)