So tonight I thought I'd have another go at installing Windows 7 but as a new install instead of an upgrade (which wouldn't work because you need to be in windows in order to run the upgrade).

But after some time of it extracting files, it gave this lovely friendly error:

Windows cannot access the installation sources. Verify that the installation sources are accessible, and restart the installation.

*yay*

Googling tended to indicate that probably the hard drive was fubar.  Fine.  Well lets see if I can boot off a live CD and mount my drive and see what can be salvaged.

The two knoppix cds I have refused to boot (the old Neither of my Knoppix cds boot. Can't find KNOPPIX filesystem, sorry. error) so tried a Suse cd Simon burnt me last year.  This thing *just worked* first go, even on the network. 

So figured out how to mount the internal drive  ( mount -t ntfs /dev/sda3 /mnt ) and then attached a memory stick.   Was able to retrieve the file I most wanted to.  But had all sorts of problems with the drive staying online (and getting lots of I/O errors in the syslog).  Stu brought home a large hard drive for me to copy files to, but Suse kept wanting to make the NTFS drive read only.  Tried a few things, but in the end just formatted the disk as linux.  Will be able to copy off from a live CD if need be.

So I'm currently copying off what I can from stuff I know I've modified in the past few weeks.

The plan is to buy a new drive as soon as possible, install Windows 7 on it (Windows will be on a separate partition this time!!), then restore/retrieve my data from backups.  The medium term plan is to get a file server so can actually do daily backups, instead of backups every couple of weeks when I bring home hard drives to backup to.

I kinda like this Suse thingie too.  May even setup a virtual machine with it on at some point.

So today I thought I'd install windows updates.  I started the process, but left it as we decided to go shopping.  When we got home the computer apparently had restarted with some error. (There might also have been an error about disk space, but the computer had six gig free).  I didn't think too much about this, and ran windows update again.  It did stuff like install IE 8 so it was definitely doing something.  It got to the end and wanted to restart, however it said there was a failed patch and gave an error code, which to be honest I didn't pay too much attention to, I just thought I'd try again after a restart.  Now to complicate matters, I'd also attached a new USB hub, but I can't remember at what point I attached it - whether it was before or after I went shopping - but probably after.

So restarted. 

The Dell splash screen came up, but then got no further.  Tried hard booting it, same thing.  No response on keyboard.  So attached the keyboard to a real usb socket and disconnected the hub.  This time it got further, but restarted, and came up with a screen saying windows failed to load.  I could try again or run the setup repair.  Trying again didn't work so tried the setup repair.  It tried to repair errors, but still wouldn't boot.  Tried repairing again (actually a couple of times).  It decided to do chkdsks.  That didn't seem to go well.  Tried using the vista repair options.  Got a dos prompt and tried a manual chkdsk.  It finally complained about not having enough space to fix errors in hiberfil.sys.  Cleared some space and tried again.  This time it completed, but the setup repair still wouldn't work.  Only messages include things like "bad patch".  Tried restoring to a system restore point of the 23rd.  Still no luck.

At this point there seemed to be no other option than to reinstall windows.  I unpacked my system cds a while back, but really have no idea where I put all the cds.  Plus I'm always paranoid those things are just going to wipe your whole hard drive and restore a stock standard image.  So I thought this would be a good opportunity to try out Windows 7.  So Stu downloaded it and I just tried installing it.

Except it seems you have to be inside a working verison of windows vista to actually run the upgrade in place.

*sigh*

So looks like will have to do a custom install and start again.  Except I don't have the disk space to spare.  Not without deleting a bunch of stuff. 

Really need to get that file server up and running.....

Epic fail!

Cause I'll never remember them next time.

• SNMP is part of add/remove programs or whatever the equivalent is in Vista
• SNMP is configured through the services control panel
  
• You have allow computers you want to connect to SNMP in the security tab of the SNMP service properties
  
• You have to allow your firewall software to allow the connection from the other computer (in my firewall this was in at least two places grrrr)
  

Useful link

We finally got the internet connected today.  Which is wonderful.  A little slow though.. probably noise on the extension that brings it closer to the computers.  Yet to be fiddled with. 

One of the first things that my myriad of browser windows reloaded with was this.. snow on Untersberg!!

I have this really bad habit of opening tonnes and tonnes of tabs in various browser windows with links from Life Hacker and Boing Boing and blogs and such places.  As well as links that I open and use but then never close.  Of course then my computer starts chugging under the load.. oops...

So thought I'd clear a few out..

There's the eight year old Google search as seen on Blogography a while back.  Eight years ago I was still on the front page of Google for Kazza :)  Apparently this won't be around for very long.

I completely and utterly want one of these for Christmas.  And a licence to fly it.  And a maintenance crew to take care of it.  Ok I'd settle for going in one.  Hell even seeing one in the air would be nice...

I still have Beep Beep open in YouTube, and the lyrics, although these aren't quite correct.. I suppose I could look for more correct ones but that would require effort. 

A useful tutorial I found on crontab when I was looking for the syntax for setting one up.  I've setup to download a snapshot of the Untersberg web cam three times a day to qualitatively see how often the mountain is in cloud.  And see the changing moods of the countryside.  I first saw some fresh snow there in late September, but that quickly melted.  There was a good covering a few days ago but that's melted too.  One of these years I'll get up that mountain - it's one of my missions in life!

Edit: Added The Atlas of the Real World, with pics here and here.

A *very very* long time ago (read: 1996), Guy introduced me to Laserwar.

Well it never worked from Windows 2000 onwards, so I haven't played it in a *very* long time. 

But was I was backing up my computer tonight I noticed it again and asked Stu if he had dos 6 on disks anywhere so I could setup a virtual machine to play all my old games.  He said just use dosbox.  So I did!  And dredged up the memories of playing this rather fun little game...

While trying to publish my previous entry (Synthy), I was getting horrible permission denied errors.
Grrr just got another one and will have to redo this post :(
It wasn't the usual /tmp full problem this time.  Looks like you can't use i f r a m e code in MT posts... hrmm...  
hell you can't even *say* it... most disturbing!!  And very frustrating given that I've just had to redo this post *again* :(

The other bit of nonsense I was looking at while trying to figure this out, is that since August 4, I've been getting several core dumps a day in my MT cgi directory.  I looked through the logs at these times and sure enough, comment spammers were hitting my blog at the time :(  Might have to upgrade a dot point or something...

193.53.87.83 - - [04/Aug/2008:12:13:02 +1000] "POST /MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi HTTP/1.0" 500 - "http://kazza.id.au/2004/09/fq-topic-posession.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060612 Minefield/3.0a1"

193.37.152.242 - - [04/Aug/2008:21:21:19 +1000] "POST /MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi HTTP/1.0" 500 - "http://kazza.id.au/MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
193.37.152.242 - - [04/Aug/2008:21:21:25 +1000] "POST /MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi HTTP/1.0" 200 2247 "http://kazza.id.au/MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

193.37.152.242 - - [04/Aug/2008:22:33:50 +1000] "POST /MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi HTTP/1.0" 500 - "http://kazza.id.au/MT-4.01-en/mt-comments.cgi" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"

So I found out today that Robocopy comes native with Vista! W00t!

Previously I've been using the old windows xp copy of ntbackup.exe, but that was a bit painful, so thought I'd give robocopy a go.  It worked pretty well, except for my profile directory.  Then it barfed all over the place and I had to fuss around with it to get it to do backups of well-buried stuff like Google Earth's myplaces.kml file. 

So anyway I have a bunch of command line options that I can script, which will make future backups to this backup disk much quicker. 

Now if only I had a bigger external hard drive that actually *fitted* everything I want to backup, and a usb hub so I don't have to ferret around the back of the computer to get the computer to recognise it...

• big kids entertained with fireworks
• shopping done
• walked around the neighbourhood
• cooked a scrumptious roast chicken
• Stu cooked a fantastic curry, with even better pears in a white wine/sugar sauce for dessert
• washed the sheets as a result of an early morning very messy nose bleed
• macquarium cleaned out and re-filled (with white gravel; note to self: a 4cm thick layer of polystyrene needs a lot of weighing down)
• watched Million Dollar Baby
• had subsequent weird dreams about having to accommodate dead-beat people in our house and not being able to stand it
• watched some of "The Triumph of the Nerds" and rather enjoyed it (even if it is twelve years old now)
• taught Stu to play Carcassonne with the game we got as a wedding present
• narrowed down a short-list of photos from the honeymoon to send to people with thankyou notes
• more flight photos located on Google Earth
• upgraded Java and installed windows updates
  

We bought a toy with our wedding present money... a little Asus Eee PC.  This was to replace the Windows 98 (!) laptop that I've been dragging around for years.  While the 98 laptop works ok, our new Sandisk 8GB Cruzer micro disks won't work with it, and it doesn't have wireless.  So on an impulse two days before we left, we got this.  And then swapped it with Yvonne who wanted a pink one but couldn't get it (and we could *only* get pink).

I have to admit I fell in love with it very quickly.  The keyboard is a bit hard to type on, the screen is microscopic, the drive is tiny (4gb)... *but* it's solid state so very little chance of the hard drive just dying, wireless just works, it's unlikely to get viruses, it's small and light, devices just work with it.

Of course Stu also likes it, so it's been a bit of an ongoing battle to get to use it ;)  He thinks we shoulda gotten two.  Which isn't *such* a silly idea.. hehe