Intuitively Obvious

Both a phrase from a Snap song and the tagline from an Energizer Bunny commercial, today this has more meaning with respect to the Ice Storm of 2008 last Thursday. A combination of heavy rain, strong wind, and rapidly freezing temperatures resulted in a record number of power outages across New Hampshire. PSNH, the state's largest electric company, reported that at the height of the problem more than 350,000 of their 500,000 customers were in the dark. Most of the problems resulted from falling tree limbs pulling down power lines, but there were also the occasional direct causes of transformers icing over (and subsequently blowing -- man, those light up the skies!), and even the random car knocking over a power pole. This morning, the report was that the lights were back on for all but 100,000 customers, and I'm pleased to say that as of 6:40am I had power.

 

In some parts of the world, I know, electric power is at best sporatic. Some places only have electricity for a limited number of hours per day, every day if they're lucky. Even within the United States there are places were power is fragile, breaking down essentially at the drop of a hat. The first house I owned (~25 years ago) had regular power outages, every couple of weeks or so, although they usually lasted an hour or so. But over the 10 years I lived there, the situation improved to the point where even a momentary blackout was a rare occurance. Now in my second house (all of 2 miles away from the first, but curiously enough, on a different power grid), I'd say that we might have lost power for a moment just once a year over the past dozen years. The grid is remarkably robust, and I consider myself blessed.

 

Thursday's storm made most of New Hampshire realize just how good we've got it. We lost the lights around 9:30pm, and they stayed off for a LONG time. For me, it was 141 hours of no heat, no lights, and (for a short time) no phone. Fortunately, the water supply stayed constant, and much to my relief our pilot light-based water heaters did their job with no electricity, so we our water remained hot as well. Having the better part of 500 gallons of propane in the tank meant that we could cook (stove-top only, the oven won't turn on without AC power), and a fireplace meant we could keep reasonably comfortable even when the outside temperature was in the low teens (Fahrenheit, -10C). Not to say we weren't caught off guard -- we usually have a small supply of firewood stacked nearby, but this year we had to rely on a bunch of armfuls of wood from our neighbors. In the end, we had many candles and flashlights going in the evening; we blocked off passageways leading to the second floor (to cut the heat loss to places we weren't using), and we slept in the living room most nights. And, yes, we did lose a lot of food in the frigerator and freezer.

 

Alternative power? Yeah, we should get ourselves a generator one of these days. I would love one that uses the propane in my tank, rather than gasoline, but I don't know what they cost. Ours is one of the few houses on the block without a generator (although I did have to help one of my neighbors get his up and running ... another story perhaps?), and the roar from various nearby houses was farily constant. There were a bunch of instances of carbon monoxide poisoning across the state, from people who (foolishly enough) thought they could run their generator or other heat source inside their house, but fortunately no one I know. Sometimes I wonder if Darwin should not only be taught but enforced ...

 

For now, however, I'm glad to be going home to a (hopefully) warm house.

So, okay, I mentioned before that this past weekend the FIRST Robotics team that I run had an outstanding FIRST LEGO League tournament at our school. It was everything you could ever hope for: the veteran members and adults helped lead the newer members through everything that needed doing, the teams of middle schoolers and their families had a good time, the events ran on schedule, and the results turned out pretty much good enough that no one could complain about anything. We've heard from numerous guests that, once again, our team did a great job.

 

And then there was the "inside story": One FLL Team (Team A) had some issues with a parent who was getting, shall we say, a tad too enthusiastic about getting the kids to follow his way of doing things. Under the guise of "look what my son did over the weekend", he tried to strong-arm the rest of the seventh graders into abandoning their efforts and adopt the LEGO bot that he (and his son) built at home. Recognizing that this would defeat the entire "team" approach, the team's coach (and the rest of the kids) balked at the prospect of his approach. Upset with the rejection, this guy found another local team (Team B) five weeks into the eight week season, joined, and convinced them that they needed to abandon their ideas and go with this new fangled approach.

 

At our competition, the Technical Judges were easily able to see that the Team B didn't really understand how their robot worked (i.e., they didn't build it). However, since the kids performed well in the Research Presentation part of the competition, they won a ticket to the State competition next month. Word on the street is that this guy took the robot home after the tournament was over, and has been spending lots of quality time with it (and his son) rebuilding / reprogramming it so that it will perform better at States. Aside from the fact that this violates the spirit (if not the letter) of the FLL regulations, doesn't this guy realize what he's doing to the rest of the team?

 

Sometimes I take a lot of criticism about how I run my FIRST team, but there's not a single student who ever feels that the mentors have more of a say than they do.

Tomorrow morning, at the BG Gymnasium, (FIRST Robotics) Team 811 will be hosting the 6th annual Cardinal Chaos FIRST LEGO League competition. A bunch of local middle- and junior high schools will be bringing their LEGO-based robots to our school to see how well they do in this year's challenge: Climate Connections. There are about 18 "missions" on the playing field (a 4' x 8' plywood sheet boardered by 2x4 walls), and the teams have 2-1/2 minutes to complete as many of them as they can. Points are awarded for each mission completed, and deducted for each penalty (for example, each time the robot fails to return to base and has to be manually retrieved).

The 6th-8th graders have been working on their creations since mid-September, so Saturday's competition is the culmination of their efforts. I'll see if I can get some pictures posted.

This morning, after assuring myself that I had in fact gotten all of the critical data off of the newly recovered hard drive from my laptop, I got bold, and put the drive back into the laptop. Lo and behold, it booted! I was ecstatic, and proceded to (among other things) restore the desktop computer I was using back to student use. Unfortunately, by lunchtime I encountered another BSD; furthermore, by mid-afternoon it suffered yet another hard crash, and the laptop is no longer bootable.

 

My wife suspects virus; she may be right, but I think it's more likely that I have a broken OS mix. While I'm ecstatic with the fact I brought the drive back from the dead, I am still a little disappointed it's not completely healed. The next chance I get (this weekend, or early next week) I will do my MBR/PBS editing again, hopefully getting the system up and running again. THEN I'll have my MIS guy refresh the NT system, and THEN I'll do a virus scan. Hopefully that will keep it from spontaneously dying.

Two and a half years ago I wrote about recovering data from corrupted hard drives (here, here, and here). Two weeks ago I wrote about having to move my hard drive from one laptop to another, because my old one was suffering from some kind of motherboard failures. Well, while the computer "worked" well enough, it obviously had an issue or two (probably due to subtle system or driver changes due to the dying motherboard), because once in a blue moon it would suffer a BSD (blue screen of death) when I was doing something fairly innocuous. But, since a brand new computer was coming RSN ("real soon now"), I figured I would keep my MIS guy off my back by coaxing the laptop along until then. You have figured I'd learn by now ...

 

Late last week, right after a BSD incident, the laptop complained upon rebooting that it had determined that the failure was because I needed to install the latest service pack for Visual Studio .NET, and all would be well. Okay, I tell it, I'm game, go ahead. It proceded to take an hour or so to download the 417MB of data (wow, that's big). Unfortunately, somewhere in the middle of the installation (I wasn't there at the time), another BSD occured. This time, it wouldn't wake up again. When I rebooted it, I'd get the manufacturers splash screen, and then ... nothing. Not the standard black screen w/ white status bar and then the XP Loading picture, just nothing. Okay, sweat starting to bead on the forehead, let's hit the old F8 key. Nothing. No hard drive activity, just plain dead.

 

I try the "move the hard drive to another computer" trick that worked so well before. Nothing. So I go to my MIS guy, and he presses the magic keys, and the system tries to boot from the network (VERY neat trick!). Okay, so the system is fine. He starts a network backup of the hard drive (since there is VERY important, and naturally not-backed up data on the drive), and he can read everything. Unfortunately, it's a binary image copy, which means that if doesn't have another drive of EXACTLY the same topology, the copy is meaningless. But it does mean that the drive isn't completely dead.

 

So, I borrow a USB drive caddy, with the SATA-ATA adapter, and I try reading the hard drive from another desktop. I plug in the USB cable, and see a message on the screen "The drive is not formatted. Do you wish to format it?" NOOOO!!!! This drive is telling me that it's got serious issues, with either the partition table or the partition boot record. (Yes, from a past life I know about both; I used to live there.) But I don't want to take a hack at it (literally) until my MIS guy has one more shot at it.

 

He tries a couple of more obscure recovery tools he's got, and late yesterday tells me that there's nothing he can do, it's all up to me. I happen to have a couple of periods free this morning, so I take the drive back. I also take another identical drive (the original drive from the laptop I hijacked two weeks ago) to serve as the valid data point. (For clarity's sake, let's call my original laptop and drive the A units, and the borrowed laptop and its drive the B units.) Armed with hard drive A, hard drive B, the SATA-ATA adapter, and a bootable floppy (with some of my magical tools from a dozen years ago), I opened up a desktop computer.

 

I put hard drive B into the desktop, booted the floppy, and used a home brew disk editor to look at the individual sectors. I see the Master Boot Record (MBR) with a valid partition table (which I dutifully copy down), pointing to a valid partition, whose partition boot sector (PBS) looks healthy. Good to know. There's lots of empty space between the MBR and PBS; this is expected. I'm a little disconcerted that live file data follows the PBS; I would have expected the equivalent of the FAT, but I know that NTFS doesn't have to have the FAT equivalent in any particular location, so I'm okay with this.

 

Then I put hard drive A into the desktop. MBR with a partition table identical to the other (expected), some blank space ... wait a moment, there's data here! The first track is not all empty! And there's no PBS at the start of the partition! Whatever overwrote this continued on, because the data that starts mid first track continues on beyond where the live stuff was. Okay, this is not good, but the explanation is here: SOMETHING corrupted the start of the drive!

 

Okay, take a breath, time to think. I reload hard drive B, and using another obscure and ancient tool of mine, I copy a bunch of the sectors from the "good drive" (including the PBS and the live data that followed) directly to the floppy. Reload hard drive A, and ... no, don't paste it down yet. First preserve the same sectors onto the floppy, in case this doesn't work. Okay, NOW copy the saved sectors from the good drive onto the same location on the bad drive. Done.

 

Now ... no, I still can't read the drive. I don't have a bootable floppy disk that can read an NTFS partition. Hmmm, okay, put the drive back into the USB caddy. Plug it into a booted system, and YES! IT SEES ALL THE DATA!

 

Immediately I start a large scale transfer of all the critical data onto a network drive. All is almost right with the world, I have the stuff I need for school again.

 

 

But now that this crisis is over, I have to wonder ... can this drive boot in my laptop again? Stay tuned ...

 

Anyway, my school has been generous enough to provide me with a laptop for years and years now, and the travel bag over my shoulder is definitely a standard part of my persona. So when my alter ego started acting strangely some weeks ago, it put me into a very strange place.

While I won’t mention manufacturer’s names, I currently have a Brand X laptop. I’ve used Brand X for years, and really like them a lot. (Which is saying something because a dozen years ago I worked for another PC manufacturer, NEC.) Anyway, a couple years ago, when the last Brand X computer was three years old, I was told that it was up for replacement, and that I would be getting a new Brand Y computer. Knowing how much I liked Brand X, I asked if I could get an X instead of a Y. As it turned out, my Brand X loyalty not only convinced them to get me an X, but five or six other people in the school got X’s as well. And other than a brief LCD noise issue, I’ve been happy for two+ years.

In the last month, however, strange things started happening to my system. The CPU fan started running at Mach speed (but the Task Manager didn’t see anything chewing up cycles). The LCD brightness would spontaneously change. The “Docking …” alert box would pop up while I was sitting in my easy chair. The system would not shut down completely when I wanted it to, forcing me to kill the power directly. The system would not (always) boot up nicely. When docked at school, it would suddenly forget that it was docked, and thus I would lose my mouse, LCD projector port, etc.

Suspecting malware, I gave it virus scans, spambot scans, adaware scans … which found a thing or two but didn’t fix the underlying problems. My tech at school and I concluded that something on the motherboard was malfunctioning, and that the system would need replacing. Curiously enough, most if not all of the other Brand X systems purchased at the same time were encountering other bizarre failures which couldn’t be tracked to any single point of failure. We concluded that, while Brand X is an otherwise fine manufacturer, we had obviously gotten a “bad batch.” Unfortunately, replacement systems (from Brand Y) were a few to several weeks off. I resigned myself to do whatever I could to keep the system alive as best as I could, and hope I could last until replacements arrive.

The past two or three days were getting very difficult. Boot-ups would take 15 minutes, if it booted at all; I could no longer connect an LCD projector to the VGA port (it appeared as though the VGA port lost the ability to hold the vertical sync). All but one particular mouse would not work. Blue Screens of Death were occurring several times a day. I would not, apparently, make it until November. So in desperation, I turned to my techie and asked if I could “borrow” one of the other systems that had been returned as defective. I swapped hard drives, and booted up my old hard drive in the new / defective system. It is working perfectly. (The techie and I are wondering if by “defective” the previous owner meant “virus plagued”?)

I figure, if nothing else, I would last the few more weeks before new systems arrive. But, if things work as well as the seem right now, I might just hold onto this, and let it last its full three years.

Well, it took a tad longer than expected (i.e., it wasn't instantaneous!), but several dozen of my blog posts from theSpoke are now part of this blog. I for one am happy I didn't lose these morsels of insight.

 

I apparently will have to go through them and add the pictures and other tags that didn't come along for the ride, and apparently all comments have been lost (maybe I can paste them on as well?), but now at least I can refer to my past wisdom when necessary.

 

And, yes, I will try to write more often, mom.

Update: I downloaded IntoSpaces from Channel 8 (actually, from CodePlex where it's published), installed it, and ran it. It found (!) the dozens of my blog entries in theSpoke, and it SAID it transfered them to here. So far, I can't see them. (I posted a comment on Channel 8, asking for assistance.) Again, stay tuned.

So I started blogging on theSpoke back in 2004, and blogged on and off for three years. Unfortunately, while theSpoke was a great place in 2004 and 2005, by 2006 it started collapsing due to spamblogs, automated spambots that did nothing but flooded theSpoke with junk blog entries. By late 2006 / early 2007 it was clear that theSpoke was dying, and I started this one. (Okay, so I haven't blogged much in the past year, but that's another story entirely.)

One of the things that bugged me about the death of theSpoke is that all those wonderful blog entries that I wrote would eventually (to use the technical term) go poof, and disappear forever.

On a whim, I went on theSpoke today. (No, I wasn't hoping things have changed; I was using a system that I hadn't in quite a while, and the Favorites in its browser included a link there.) Across the top was a banner that said "This conversation continued on Channel 8", the replacement for theSpoke. So I went there, and for the fun of it I searched the Channel 8 site for "theSpoke", wanting to see who else ended up there. Lo and behold, there was a post for a "theSpoke to Spaces blog converter." Could it be ???

Stay tuned, we're about to find out!