Well, Blow Me Down

travelswithkuma and Lisa are apparently safe, but were without power for a while, probably due to the tornado that landed in Aumsville, about 10 miles west of where they are. I haven't spoken with Lisa yet, but I'm relieved to hear that they are okay.

Last of the Inquisition

The rest of the video from the Fannish Inquisition, consisting of bids for future Worldcons, is now online.

My next task with the SMOFCon web site is to start posting the programming notes from those panels where people did take notes. This will give the convention a sort of online "proceedings" document.

Fingers Crossed

After yet another failure-to-boot, followed by the failure-to-boot of backup clone #1, I decided that I'd had enough of this and would move on to Plan B: I got out the hard drive that originally shipped with this computer and cloned the 40GB drive into one of the failing-to-boot 320GB drive. I then put the 40GB as-shipped drive back in the fire safe and booted from the 320GB drive (remember, all three of the 320GB drives have passed both diagnostics and CHKDSK, so I figure they're probably good but had bad data of some sort on them).

Today, while I did my Day Jobbe on my work computer (naturally enough), I had the personal machine sitting to one side as I installed applications, configured them, and eventually copied my data back from the other non-booting 320GB drive. I think I've got everything saved that I want saved. My documents are also backed up onto the large "brick" external hard drive. I moved more photos and videos onto DVD-ROMS (that's effectively an additional backup since they're also on the "brick." So I'm almost at the point where I can clone the drive, which has now booted dozens of times since just about every application wants to reboot the computer after installation, and some want to do it multiple times. I'm going to clone it into the other non-booting 320GB drive and say goodbye to whatever was on that drive before.

One new wrinkle this time: I've told my drive-cloning software, Total Recovery Pro, to put in a system recovery trap at boot time. So after POST I get a simple black screen asking if I want WinXP or the TRP Recovery Console, which is a self-booting copy of TRP separate from Windows proper. I don't know if this will make any difference, but I'm going to give it a try.

Meanwhile, I also bought another used machine on eBay and had it shipped to Oregon so that it will be there when I get there this weekend. And I'm carrying a crate of computers and hard drives with me. Some of these machines should work.