19962013
Out of Commission
I've been in Mar del Plata for a few days now. Things have been busy,
so I haven't had a chance to do any blogging, do any sightseeing or
much of anything but eat tons of beef (do they serve anything else in
Argentinian supperhouses?) and sit in back-to-back and seemingly
endless meetings.
I've also been without a computer for 24 hours now. During yesterdays WSIS Workshop my computer froze. Its been doing this off and on for the last couple of weeks and seems to fix itself with a reboot. It actually hasn't happened frequently enough for me to worry about having to diagnose and fix it. I haven't lost any work, and its only happened a handful of times.
Yesterday's freeze was a little bit different though.
This time, my computer failed to restart when I rebooted. I mean, it would start to load Windows, but couldn't load "Wup.sys" (Windows user partition?) - which caused a critical loading failure that Windows couldn't recover from.
Translation: Something got scrambled and I can't turn my computer on.
I managed to borrow a Windows installation disk, but was only able to find out that the filesystem has been completely screwed up. The Windows installation only gave me two options - reformat the drive and lose all my data, or delete the offending partition and lose all my data. Not terribly good options.
I've put the word out that I could benefit from some enhanced disk diagnostics tools. For those of you playing along at home, please keep your fingers crossed for me :)
The upside is that I didn't actually lose all that much in terms of data. I've recently started sync'ing my drive with my workstation at the office, so I expect that I only lost those things that I've created since I left - a few documents and one hundred, mostly uninteresting, photographs.
James Woods was nice enough to lend me his Powerbook to do some work and write this blog entry. Its digging into my wrist. I prefer to have my keyboard closer to the front of the notebook than the Powerbook. I'd die of RSI if I actually used one of these on a fulltime basis.
But I appreciate the brief time I've got to check some email and do some light blogging! :)
I've also been without a computer for 24 hours now. During yesterdays WSIS Workshop my computer froze. Its been doing this off and on for the last couple of weeks and seems to fix itself with a reboot. It actually hasn't happened frequently enough for me to worry about having to diagnose and fix it. I haven't lost any work, and its only happened a handful of times.
Yesterday's freeze was a little bit different though.
This time, my computer failed to restart when I rebooted. I mean, it would start to load Windows, but couldn't load "Wup.sys" (Windows user partition?) - which caused a critical loading failure that Windows couldn't recover from.
Translation: Something got scrambled and I can't turn my computer on.
I managed to borrow a Windows installation disk, but was only able to find out that the filesystem has been completely screwed up. The Windows installation only gave me two options - reformat the drive and lose all my data, or delete the offending partition and lose all my data. Not terribly good options.
I've put the word out that I could benefit from some enhanced disk diagnostics tools. For those of you playing along at home, please keep your fingers crossed for me :)
The upside is that I didn't actually lose all that much in terms of data. I've recently started sync'ing my drive with my workstation at the office, so I expect that I only lost those things that I've created since I left - a few documents and one hundred, mostly uninteresting, photographs.
James Woods was nice enough to lend me his Powerbook to do some work and write this blog entry. Its digging into my wrist. I prefer to have my keyboard closer to the front of the notebook than the Powerbook. I'd die of RSI if I actually used one of these on a fulltime basis.
But I appreciate the brief time I've got to check some email and do some light blogging! :)
See this post as it first appeared on Blogware.
3 comments
Comments are closed - these are kept exactly as they were left.
(name not saved), April 7, 2005
Hey Ross;
I know you said you didn't lose much data, but something I've found useful to recover the little bits (or bytes) that didn't get backed up is to use a Live CD like the one available from Ubuntu Linux. I'd never have thought of it if a colleague hadn't pointed out its tremendous usefulness. I have a stack of them sitting on my desk, but that doesn't do you much good :-).
Anyway, good luck
(name not saved), April 7, 2005
Ross, don't fall into that whole Microsoft propaganda that Windows Equals Existance. It's almost sacrilege to say so, but losing Windows isn't the end of the world, nor your data.
The fact that Windows attempted to start and came up with that wup.sys error means that the important parts of the FILE SYSTEM are still viable. What is messed up is your WINDOWS INSTALLATION. If the machine attempts to boot that far, then the partition table, boot sectors, bootstrap loader, directory sectors, and at least part of Windows, being all of the important parts, are still good.
Piece of cake. Take out the harddrive, change the jumpers to match, and stick it in another computer as a drive D: (or whatever). Then you will be able to copy off any and all data from it onto the other machine's C: drive. At most depending on your setup, you may have to override the security by "Claiming Ownership" of the files. It's buried, but easy enough. It's just out of the scope of a blog comment.
After you have all of your data, simply change the jumpers back, remount into the original machine, and reinstall Windows.
Just cause Windows can't figure out how to load, doesn't mean that the data or the drive is bad. General rule of thumb. If the drive turns, then you can almost always get the data off. If it doens't turn, it's slightly more difficult.
Bryan Britt
Beltane Web Services
BlogTower
(name not saved), April 10, 2005
Hey Ross -
Enjoy Mar del Plata - my wife is from Argentina, and I've been to Mar Del Plata, Miramar, Pinamar, etc. - it must be really nice over there. Make sure to eat some "parilla" (there are some restaurants that serve all you can eat "tenedor libre" of the best steak). Also, be sure to bring a lot of alfajores from HAVANNA (the best) - if you can bring us a box of 12 (or 24 if you have room), that will be great ;-) I have to warn you, though - those can be quite addictive! Enjoy Mar Del Plata, and be sure to spend a bit of time in Buenos Aires!