My wife’s laptop rolled over today and showed us it’s ugly blue screen… which revealed..
STOP 0x000000ED UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

I then ran the Dell diagnostics (found by hitting F12, just after boot, then selecting Diagnostics). The diagnostics reported the below for the hard drive..
DST Short Status Test–FAIL
Error code 1000-0142
MSG:UNIT4: DRIVE SELF TEST FAIL
Not comforting but ok..

I then downloaded a quick and dirty recovery boot cd found here ( I know there are better and more packed util’s out there but I just wanted to get this fixed asap)
The Computer Paramedic – Recovery Console CD Image
Burned it to cd.

Loaded into Recovery Console and typed:
chkdsk c: /p/r

After roughly an hour (don’t worry I was busy doing other stuff), I rebooted the machine and voila, got the laptop to roll back over and play nice once again.

Happy wife, Happy husband..

In my last post titled “This site may harm your computer..” I ranted about on my Saturday morning regarding my google search efforts which were all being flagged as harmful.

The BBC reports Google attributed the Saturday morning issue to human error. Go figure… Google gets their filter list from stopbadware.org and apparently they received it fine (assuming) and when they inserted the list this go round, all sites were incorrectly marked or flagged as malicious in some manner. Google’s VP of Search and User Experience admitted that tighter controls need to be wrapped around this manual process.. Hallelujah!

Reading further into this at the stopbadware.org blog it appears that Google does not use them for their filtering and its a home grown product. That makes more sense to me.. than what I read on the BBC page.

Finally, reading on Google’s Official blog it appears that the / was marked as malicious hence marking anything and everything else as malicious. Now we understand – taking the long way around the internet but oh well, at least I now know what made my surfing (and I’m sure a few of you other folks as well) a little rougher that Saturday morning. I’m at ease now.

Source: BBC

Windows File Transfers suck, let’s face it. I would have hoped that by now Windows would have above average file transfer capabilty built in by default – but NO, they choose to have Movie Maker instead

Chuck, what are you talking about? Let me explain. Take a 500 meg file and copy it across a local or wide area network to another windows machine (using either a mapped drive or unc path). While the transfer is occuring do something stupid (yank the ethernet cable, disable the nic, boot the switch or router, restart the machine on the other end, etc.). You’ll clearly watch your file transfer take a dump (literally). Microsoft could help low lives like myself who sit at home and ponder thoughts like this with a little extra effort. I’m not quite sure if Vista resolves this issue but I’m not giving into Windows Vista just yet so it’ll be sometime before I see that functionality. If any of you out there are using Vista, I’d love to here if this works for you? (that is without Total Copy – and from what I can see, this version is not available for Vista – so you might have to gopher for something else). My logic for using Total Copy was just for simplicity sake not to promote their product, but heck I’m going to use it on all my machines

Anyhow, go ahead and undo what you did above (put back the cable, enable the network card, etc.). Make sure you have a connection between the 2 windows machines. Map your drive or do a unc path and then install this a little app named Total Copy (currently at 1.10 official release). Now, that you have it installed right click and drag the 500 meg file from your pc to that remote machine and select the “Total Copy” option. Go ahead, don’t be scared. Yank the cable! Down the interface – do as you please. Wait until the thing chokes and you’ll receive a menu from Total Copy stating that it sensed something bad happen. Options include:
Retry every 20 seconds
Skip file
Manual retry
blah blah blah…

Ok, now wait a little while. Go grab a nice cold Dew crack it open and take a nice swig. Re-enable the network card or undo whatever you did in the step above. Once you’ve re-established connectivity hit the manual retry. In my case I was asked if I want to overwite the file, copy rest…etc. I chose Copy rest. Low and behold a little while later – the file copied (without the need to start from scratch and without the senseless worrying you’d do if you were uncertain that the link between the 2 machines would remain up for the duration!). Such a stupid little thing that can make such a HUGE (Absolutely Enormous) difference to us IT people. Total Copy is only 252KB in size!!! So, why can’t Microsoft put this functionality in their OS (they’ve got MovieMaker) ? I know tons of Sysadmin’s who would be real appreciative (including myself). The OS used for this example is Windows XP Professional SP 2.

In today’s world, files are enormous and you don’t want to spend extra time re-sending them (only for the potential failure to reoccur). Yeah, I know, I could use ftp, sftp, etc. but I still wouldn’t mind having the SMB option available to me. Heck sometimes ya just want to use what comes from the factory!!!

Anyhow, just my 2 cents.. Hope it helps someone out there in the digital world.

Check out this windows wireless screen. This screen comes up when you are connecting to a wireless network. Tell me if you see anything wrong with it?

Ok, the wording is fine – the problem is with the icons. The old file transfer icons. Yes the piece of paper is actually moving from one folder to the other (sorry, I didn’t save it as an animated gif). So why the heck would you have the file transfer icons on a connection setup message box? I dunno… I just got a giigle from it as I was waiting for Windows to establish a connection. What happened to the Dial Up networking icon? How about that one instead.

I’ve been using Active Sync (4.1,2,5) and they all suck when you have wireless enabled. I see that 4.5 has the option to leave wireless up when using Active Sync – no matter, it still knocks mine down. And, the only way I have found to re-establiish my wireless connection is to reboot. How about that. Makes you want to go out and get a Mac – solely to get acquainted with Mac troubles and see if they are as bad as Windows problems. I’m taking that path and by May I should have a Mac sitting in my home. Can’t wait… No Vista for me.

Cheers!

I had a friend call me up the other night – not to say hi, not to tell me some good news, no. He called for support! So I ask, what’s the deal. He then tells me he installed a new WordPress and installed all these funky themes and one of them killed the site. So, I visited the site and sure enough there were errors all over with no web site accessible. I asked if he had his sql server credentials handy so we could take a look at the values stored in the database. He handed those over before I finished asking the question. I started poking around the database and found that setting the following values to default got his site to be accessible again, so he could later go on and screw it up again – but now he can come here, read this and know where to go to undo the damage.

Within the database (his was a mysql flavor of db server) look for the table called ‘cd_options’ (sans quotes). The table has a prefix of ‘cd_’ added to it, so yours may appear a little different (should end in options if a prefix was added or just options if none was added). Within that table see fields:
template and stylesheet
Change the option value to ‘default’ for both and then refresh the WordPress web site. You should be back in business.

There’s probably a million ways to recover from one of these situations – this was the first that came to mind and worked. By the way, he was installing the new 2.1 version of wordpress (not sure how far back or forward this tip will flow, but heck – its worth a try if you ever get caught in that bind).

Happy blogging..