hardware chart

http://sprki.com/computer-hardware-chart.html

The new computer blues.... part 389

Still working on transcoding my life from my old machine to the new box.  I have finished trying to move software licenses across.  The final casualty list is:

Profactor Include Manager
Parasoft Insure++
Visual Lint
PC-Lint
Helpndoc
Camtasia Studio

I think these are the only ones I have completely lost... Adobe CS4 Master Collection is on life support but seems to be functional. 

I have put the old hard drive into a caddy I scrounged and mounted it permanently in the new case rather than the external io board that I have been using to swap it back and forth between the old and the new case.  I have deleted all the duplicate backups between the two systems and apart from deleting the system partition... I think I have stabalised the file pile. 

I have killed the virtual machines I created of the old system as they simply did not boot no matter how tricky I tried to be.  I could mount one of them as a VHD... but only enough so I could create a WIM file from the volume.  Since the WIM is 42GIG rather than the 92GIG for the VHD, I'm keeping that for a while longer. I've already tested that I can rebuild the system partition and boot from the WIM on bare metal... but not as a virtual machine.. doh. It would have been nice to have that option... but the reasons and the effort are just not making it a worthy investment of my time anymore.

I have put the old case back together, tagged it and put it into the scrap pile... slightly melancholy moment.... more about the amount of time I have spent with it rather than its current state of sluggish cpu, dying hard drive and dust bunny collection.  Still its been my partner in crime for nearly half a decade and rarely missed a beat. 

Just have to get a robust backup solution implemented now and I am back to making forward progress.  I find it quite scary to collapse from 3 copies of everything, to two... to idea of deleting my old backups to make room for the new (the drive is too small for both) is quite nerve wracking.  I have only just finished a data recovery job on another machine that has takes about two months.  Going commando with my my last 10 years of data is just a little.... worrying.  Even if it only takes a few hours to rebuild the backup.  Probably should just bite the bullet and buy a bigger backup drive... half a T is just not enough anymore.

Windows xp to vhd pain

I have been converting to a new workstation and to avoid some of the trauma wanted to convert my old system to a VHD so I could run it a bit longer in a VM.  Seemed possible and sounded like a good idea....

Firstly, my experience with vhd's and vms was fairly basic.... I had created a couple and played with various OS's using VirtualBox and VirtualPC2007 but never really needed to use them (as the old PC was struggling anyway...)

So I started by pulling the hard drive from my old case and plugging it into the new one as a second drive. No problem.  Then used Disk2vhd to capture a VHD image from the system partition.  (98GB later...), created a virtual machine in VPC2007 and tried to boot it.  ...tada.... doh!  Lockup.

Go into safe mode..... locks at Mup.sys.  (I have been here before with various boxes so I thought it probably had something to do with the HAL and the change in hardware or a bad driver...) easy enough.

Break out the winXP installation disk to try to get Recovery Console up and running... (unfortunatly the disk was created using nLite so the recovery console had been stripped out... damit.) ... ok, scrounged through the box of CD's and found a winXP SP2 disk and was back on track... Boot from CD in the VM, go to recovery console... read a couple of pages on line.... try a couple of the suggestions ( bad boot sector so run fixmbr and fixboot, run chkdsk and get a weird response.... run diskpart (xp generation of diskpart) and see it choke to death ) After these changes the whole partition became unbootable and I learned more fully about undo disks on VM's.  "This volume does not contain a recognised file system" etc etc lots of general badness.  Ok, maybe this is more than I thought.

Create a whole fresh VHD (and a copy of it this time...) and start again.

Try to install a fresh xp system over the top of the old one.... "Current Installation is too damaged or full to install... blah blah" thats no help.  Just wants to format the disk  seems to think the file system is unknown. 

Boot using winPE and check with a more current version of diskpart, it finds the disk and the volume but canot figure the file system.  Thinks its a RAW fs.  Thats not right ... or good.

More reading online. This post on why xp cant be booted as aVHD  gave me some hints about the why and some hints about a maybe solution.  Somehow the HAL and the boot loader in winXP were not happy... kind of confirmed what I had been seeing.  However, the bootloader in my vhd's seemed fine.  It was just when windows tried to play with the partion and mount the file system it all went to hell.

There were hints that the disk2vhd tool or VPC2007 could somehow fool the system and patch it.  So I rebuilt the old machine and ran disk2vhd in the active session and there was a new little check box that said something like "Prepare vhd for use in VM"... I checked it and let it build the vhd over night.

So after all that... move it all back to the new machine and run up a VM using the new vhd. (Number 4 so far) ....

The bootloader has been obviously changed, and now has a new option "Disk2vhd Microsoft Windows XP Professional" and the normal "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" option.

Booting to the "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" option results in the same failure at Mup.sys. While booting to the new shiny option seems to get a bit further but now it bluescreens with "UNMOUNTABLE_ BOOT_VOLUME".  Damit.

So where too now....

Honestly I think I'm stuffed.  The only options I can see are either try to copy files into a freshly built XP VM or conversly copy files from a freshly built XP VM to try to path this one. by mounting both VHD's in the one VM.... Or ????

I have spent about as long as I can trying to get this sorted... I may have to move on to other things.

One other detail I have not explored is the fixed size vs dynamically expanding VHD.  It may be possible to convert the VHD to something that will be able to be mounted correctly.

Interestingly when I try to add the VHD I created using Disk2vhd without the little checkbox being ticked ( I'm sure the option was not availible at the time) anyway... when I add it as a second hard drive its still mounting as unformatted and unreadable, so perhaps there is something even more fundamentally broken.  It's still 98GB in size so that may be a factor..

Also I have just checked the one created using the magic check box and its comming up as unreadable and XP wants to format it. WTF?

Microsoft Interoperability Center

http://www.interoperabilitybridges.com/

This is yet another strange and little known set of resources that make our lives easier.  Basically resources for gluing Microsoft tech with the rest of the world.

Steve Jobs Thoughts on Flash

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Its been around for a while but I've only just found it.  This is the best ( getting information from the source is like that!) explanation of the Adobe Flash vs Apple spat.  The points are well written and essentially un-arguable.  A cynical person might wonder how many people spent time polishing this memo before it was published; but thats the nature of publishing on behalf of a large organisation... so.... back to reality.

Sux to be Adobe.

Swapping keyboards is complicated

http://www.sense-lang.org/typing/games/balloon.php?key=EN

My current favorite typing tutor. I have swapped to a Kinesis Freestyle keyboard and its been a bit of an adaption curve. This site provides some useful exercises to help get me back up to speed.

I started by moving the whole keyboard to the ideal 30 degree split but found it too much too soon and put it back together. I have since been progressively moving the angle and adapting slowly.  I am still not a fan of the key layout. I appreciate the loss of the numeric keypad but I have some kind of brain failure with the backspace and delete keys. I constantly seem to be getting them backward. Mainly because the delete key is approximately where I expect the backspace key to be which works the reverse of my intuitive expectation, then when I realize the mistake, I have to consciously think about the solution and it gets very messy. Suffice to say its working itself out but breaking long habits is challenging without the regular practice of a keyboard trainer.

The other irritating thing is the keys on the left hand side of the keyboard. They are essentially useless. They are sort of shortcut keys to reduce RSI but need to be completely learned. My biggest problem is I keep trying to feel for the lower left ctrl key which used to be the left most bottom key, but now its not. I keep hitting the shortcut key for context menus instead.  Like I said, irritating but not life ending.

I have also been using the Evoluent upright mouse for a while. I would say that my adaption to it has been less useful. I still habitually try to hold it from the top down. And I find my coordination and precision is pretty crap when I do hold it the right way. Rather than driving from the wrist, I find I end up moving from the elbow which is much less precise. Probably from lack of practice. Still its a whole new set of muscles and nerves to train so it would be good to get some mouse training games happening.
I happened to do some timed testing tasks with it the other day and my coordination was a bit slower than usual and it made me feel like I was fighting the mouse rather than it being an intuitive extension of my hand.

Blah.  I am still not game to try the Kinesis advantage keyboard. I'm worried that if I adapt to that I will get even less capable with all the normal keyboards I use every day. As a Tech I need to be able to work on any of the computers in the place and not being able to drive the keyboards I find would be a big disadvantage. I'm still wondering if I can maintain two similar sets of competency without making a mess of both (as usually happens for me)