Restless C#ding

Working on trying to repair a friend's PC, I've encountered a hard drive so toasted, the file system is unrecognizable. The funny thing is that there's actually no "click of death" coming from the disk, but even a FIXMBR failed to recognize the old school FAT file system ("unrecoverable errors", file names that are all smiley faces (!), and my personal favorite, the reporting of the size as "10,XXX kilobytes" -- ouch!).

So I'm installing a fresh OS on the machine and giving it back as a pristine machine.... sans all saved data, documents, personal information, and settings.

Makes me feel a bit defeated....

I moved servers within our location at work today. While it was a pretty physical workout (servers containing many drives & redundant power supplies make for some heavy lifting), it was much more mentally draining.

It's amazing how long & panicked the wait between powering up a RAID array is, and the time it states it's fully functional is. All went well, and Hyper-V is right where it belongs. I could actually feel my heart beating in my chest as I watched the lights cycle... finally rendering their blue verdict.

My only complaint so far with Hyper-V in Windows 2008 is the weak support of P2V (that is, Physical to Virtual conversion). I've got some pretty dated win 2000 servers that I'd like to retire, but it seems I need to create the VM's the old-fashioned way, through windows install disks, and manually copying the data over. The only other issue so far I've found with windows 2008 is the difficulty in Apple machines getting an IPv4 address through DHCP on a Windows 2008 server. Hopefully I'll find a way around that, since I can force people to use Windows.

While upgrading home machines, my wife and I bought an upgrade machine for her that was in fact 64 bit. I figured these days that the primary hurdle had been jumped and most hardware and software supported the 64 bit vista platform. What transpired was that it was mostly true, save for Palm.  After checking (way after buying the hardware), Palm (and their OS provider "Access") are quite adamant about the lack of support for the 64 bit OS.

Specifically, this is due to the USB charging / synchronization cable, but even attempting to use a Kensington USB Bluetooth dongle failed to allow syncing the Palm with Vista 64. The return on investment is not enough to justify my continuous battle with the synching process; the current plan is for her to use our laptop to do so.

What's amazing to me however is not only that it didn't synch, but that it didn't even cross my mind to check, even after seeing the "64 bit OS installed" sticker on the machine on the Best Buy display. Clearly the platform / architecture even still has room to grow with respect to driver support!