TO-Tech Blog

Just bringing closure to my little experiment with SpinRite and a nasty looking 120GB drive. After watching SpinRite grind through a single sector for something like 10 days, I noted its spot and stopped it. After fussing around a bit with SpinRite and level 1 (which doesn’t mark problems permanently), I decided to restart it at just beyond the problem area and let it go on at level 2 over the long Labor Day weekend. As you can see from the screen photo above, it finished the last half (really about 43%) in 41 hours and 25 minutes. You can see that the second half of the drive was in pretty bad shape too though it did manage to recover 3 spots. I’m planning to reboot the drive to see what happened to the Linux system on the drive after going through this long SpinRite repair process. The drive should obviously be put out to pasture. But, I’ll keep it around the office in case I need to show anyone what a bad drive looks like in SpinRite.

SpinRite had been running over 330 hours (nearly 2 weeks) and said it needed another 7500+ hours (312+ days) to complete the job  when I decided to, um, change course. As I mentioned earlier, the disk just contained a test Linux server. So, there wasn’t anything critical on it and this exercise was one of curiosity. If you look at my screen shot from August 20 and then look at the screen shot from today above. You’ll see that SpinRite has essentially not moved from the bad sector it has been working on for the last 10 days. So, I noted where it was, terminated the process (rebooted) and did the following: I changed the scan level from 2 to 1 (read scan only) and advanced the pointer to the 57% mark to get around the known bad area. An hour later, SpinRite had moved from that point to over 80% complete (with a lot of green R’s noting more bad areas it found) and should be done within another hour or so.

A small old Linux test PC starting generating hard disk sector error messages in its log files last week Thursday. So, I shut it down and booted it with a SpinRite CD (we have a site license, thank goodness). When the first two red U’s indicating uncorrectable errors appeared, I wasn’t surprised to see it estimate an additional 13 hours to scan the remainder of the disk. But, I was not prepared to see this when I came into the office Monday morning (more than 3 days later).

As you can see, it was only 56% of the way done (or so its current estimate reported) and lots of red U symbols indicating lots of hard disk problems. Fortunately, this is just a test system and nothing needs to be truly recovered. So, this is mostly an academic exercise since I’ve never seen this many problems on a disk. Actually, this is the first time I’ve seen SpinRite report problems at all. My gut estimate is that I will need to wait a few more days before I can reboot the system back into Linux and see exactly what is missing and how usable the system is in this semi-recovered state. The entire scanning and repair process may take a week. So, this is truly an exercise in patience. BTW, the PC is a Pentium III (remember those). Despite their age, they make great little Linux boxes to build custom gateways and other semi-appliance type functions.

First PC Magazine’s John Dvorak writes Me and My Mac. In it he talks about the Mac he got for his work for Podshow. He says he is not switching to a Mac for personal use, but uses it at that office and has been recommending Macs to friends.

The outgoing PC Magazine Editor in Chief Jim Louderback wrote in his final column Passing the Torch: I could go on and on about the lack of drivers, the bizarre wake-up rituals, the strange and nonreproducible system quirks, and more. But I won’t bore you with the details. The upshot is that even after nine months, Vista just ain’t cutting it. I definitely gave Microsoft too much of a free pass on this operating system: I expected it to get the kinks worked out more quickly. Boy, was I fooled! If Microsoft can’t get Vista working, I might just do the unthinkable: I might move to Linux.

In a previous blog entry I cited a survey by Patchlink reporting that 87% of the businesses they surveyed said they would stay with Windows XP. I haven’t experienced all the problems reported by Louderback and other people. But, I’ve seen a bunch including the nearly inaccessible network settings and printer driver problems in Vista.

I like a lot of the features in Vista and still use it daily. But, I have to admit that my next “PC” will probably be a new Mac mini to replace my 1st generation PowerPC-based Mac mini running Mac OS X Leopard and either VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop for Mac for Windows compatibility.

Is Vista the end of the line for Windows as the dominant desktop OS? Will web-based applications and Mac OS X or Linux start getting more traction?

I noticed a bunch of Blu-ray DVD boxed sets at Costco yesterday. These were (if I recall correctly) 4 movies for around $80. I found it kind of odd since I seem to remember only seeing HD DVD players on the other side of the store. So, what does one do with this high-def format war? On one hand Blockbuster will only carry Blu-ray. On the other, HD DVD players are a lot cheaper (affordable). I’m not going to make a choice for the moment. But, my gut instinct is to look at Sony’s (Blu-ray creator) history of format fiascoes and lean towards HD DVD. To recap Sony’s failed storage format products…

• Betamax
• Mini Disc
• Memory stick
• ATRAC audio file format
• UMD (Playstation Portable disc format)

And, while the CD (Sony/Philips) has been a huge success, let’s not forget who decided to put a root kit on music CDs. And, don’t forget the exploding notebook batteries.

I’m hoping the HD picture becomes clearer (pun intended) by the 2007 holiday season so I can finally decide which one to swing towards.

The PC World article…

Businesses Rethink Vista

…reports on surveys conducted by Patchlink that indicates that the number of businesses who said they were staying with Windows XP instead of upgrading to Vista went up from 53% in December 2006 (before Vista was released) 87% in July.

One of my blog items over on the O’Reilly Media WindowsDevCenter site…

Windows Vista Doesn’t Run Any of My Software! Oh, Really?

…posted on May 1 continues to draw venomous comments about Windows Vista because of its software compatibility and lack of hardware driver support. Now, many of these comments are made without actually naming a single specific application. So, there may be a bit of anti-Microsoft trolling at work there. I’ve used Windows Vista for over two years now (Beta, Release Candidate, and production versions) and have run into only a handful of applications that didn’t work. But, I’ve definitely run into a bunch of hardware driver issues. That said, I actually like Windows Vista and use it for a good chunk of the day on my notebook PC at work.

Given the general anti-Vista sentiment appears to be rising, I wonder if Windows Vista may be Microsoft’s PlayStation 3. Sony’s PS2 was the dominant game console for many years. Even the Xbox really didn’t do much more than dent its dominance. But, the PS3 doesn’t seem very popular except with hard core gamers. The Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360 seems to have over-taken the PS3.

I think Vista’s problem is that it didn’t go far enough. Its incompatibility and user experience issues (I hate those UAC pop-ups) stem from trying to bandaid over years of Windows code. Microsoft should have bitten the bullet the way Apple did when they moved from OS 9 to OS X. Microsoft could have dealt with compatibility issues by providing a big upgrade to their Virtual PC product (instead of the incremental one they produced). A Microsoft Virtual PC that had the features of VMware Workstation and bundled with a Windows XP SP2 license would have allowed Vista users to simply move their current environment to a virtual machine and then migrate to the real Vista Windows as applications and drivers arrived. Instead, Virtual PC is too weak in the USB support area to really do much good as a complete virtualized environment.

With good virtual machine support available for the Mac (Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMWare Fusion), I wonder if we might see the migration there instead of Vista. The big problem, of course, is that most people will have to buy an XP license which is hard to find these days and somewhat expensive to do if one is found (since their old PCs probably came with a non-transferable OEM Windows XP). But, still if one is going to have application and hardware compatibility issues, why not move to a modern Linux or Mac OS X operating system instead of sticking with the nearly six year old Windows XP?
So, does Windows XP == Sony PS2? And, does Windows Vista == Sony PS3? We’ll should know within the next 12 months or so. I’m going to keep using Vista on my PCs (and just bought VMware Fusion to try to virtualize it on a Mac). But, I may be in the minority if the various published reports are true.

Like many other people most of my “work work” for my day-job is on a notebook PC. It is a pretty nice one with a Core 2 Duo processor, 120GB hard disk, dual display support, and enough dedicated plus shared graphics RAM to make Vista look nice (3D Flip, etc.). Off to the side I have a nearly 4 year old desktop PC for “busy work” like writing weekly reports, filling out forms, email, etc. So, I’ve been quite puzzled why the free drive space on its relatively tiny 40GB hard drive (by today’s standards) kept getting smaller and smaller until it was almost out of space the other day.

After poking around a bit, I decided to delete the Windows uninstall directories (which numbered in the many of dozens after years of Patch Tuesdays) and the \Windows\Temp directories (which also numbers in the many dozens). It took quite a while for the old PC to just delete the thousands and thousands of files (literally) from those directories. However, when it finished I found I had freed up over 10GB of space on the 40GB drive So, 25% of the drive had been literally filled up with useless junk files.

This may not be much of an issue with PCs with hundreds of gigabytes of hard drive space. But, if you have a small old PC like mine, take a careful look at the temp files on your system. And, be sure to backup your PC before embarking on an exercise like mine (lest you delete something you shouldn’t by accident).

The Windows XP Suspend/Resume feature is generally a statistical event in my experience. Sometimes it works and often times it forces a reboot that causes problems if you have Word, Excel, or PowerPoint open as part of the suspended processes. This was such an issue for me that the last two notebook PCs I bought for my office and home were an Apple iBook G4 and an Apple MacBook (respectively). Mac OS X resumes from sleep about 99.999% of the time. I was shocked the one or two times it did not resume properly over the past two years. With Windows XP, I’m shocked when resume actually resumes.

So, far, Windows Vista’s sleep/resume feature on a Dell Latitude D600 (3+ year old notebook) seems to be behaving quite well (much better than XP Professional). So much so that I’m considering buying a Windows notebook when they start appearing with the Sidenote LCD and ReadyDrive flash drive features.

Here’s hoping that Sleep/Resume is working better on your Vista box than it did on your XP box.

I went to this site for the first time after learning about an interesting Bruce Eckel article published there.

Now, I realize that Ajax World Magazine is about, well, Ajax. But, couldn’t they have toned down the pop-ups and Flash. Do I really need to have a bunch of Flash animation distracting me from reading Eckel’s article?

Earth to AjaxWorld. Leave the annoying pop-ups and excessive Flash animation to sites where that is the main attraction.