Miracles Still Happen
July 8th, 2009I’m Back
Here’s a post that will help explain why it’s hard for computer nerds to get women. The boredom may actually stop your heart.
I got my new hard drive installed. I can’t believe it. I’ll put the information here in case some Googler needs it.
I tried to use Acronis Migrate Easy to move my old stuff to a new 500 GB drive (cheap!), but Acronis could not find the new drive when I tried to run it from Windows. With this program, you provide your instructions in Windows, and then it reboots your PC and moves the files, possibly in Linux or some other OS. Nerds can fill in the blanks here. When I rebooted, Acronis could not find the drive.
The remedy for this is to make a boot CD using Acronis, and do it from there. Sadly, Migrate Easy refused to cooperate, saying I had to get the pay version in order to do this.
The answer? Lifeguard Tools from Western Digital. It’s free, and you can find it online. I hooked the new drive up, told the program what to do, and in a few hours, I had a clone of my boot drive.
What happened when I tried to use the PC? You can guess. I took off the old drive, put the new one in its SATA hole, and hit the switch. “Error Loading OS.”
I figured I was toasted. But I was wrong. Here’s the answer. You boot from your XP installation DVD, go to the recovery console, locate your Windows installation, and fun FIXMBR. After that, the system worked.
Now I have to throw out the old drive. I’m not sure there’s a problem with it, but new drives are very inexpensive, so I don’t need to take a chance. I hate throwing out hard drives. You practically have to melt them in a kiln to be sure no one gets the information on them. Some idiot could raid my trash and take over my life. I’ll make sure nobody but Harry Potter could read this one. Have you ever tossed an old drive in the trash without messing it up first? I think you have to be nuts.
Whenever I travel, my hard drives come out, and I put them where no one will ever find them. The security is more than worth the aggravation.
I found some more good information. AVG is not the greatest free antivirus program. Something called Bitdefender is better. I installed it and ran it, and I found a Trojan. Irritating. The Bitdefender folks just changed their software to nail this one, and AVG can’t even find it. Same for Spybot and Ad-Aware. I also ran some cleaner programs and deleted a lot of trash, but only Bitdefender did the job.
I suspect that AVG was my problem. The PC doesn’t seem to be overheating badly enough to freeze it (it stays under the critical 60° C mark), and I haven’t read anything about this particular virus locking up computers. AVG, on the other hand, has been throwing off crash reports, and it has been taking over. They installed a ridiculous search bar and a bunch of other things I didn’t want.
The computer was on all night (virus scan), and it worked fine. Maybe I’m in the clear. Or maybe I have more viruses, which Kim Jong Il will one day use to launch DDOS attacks on the South Park guys.
I am considering taking out my motherboard and replacing the idiotic Intel plastic pins with real bolts. The CPU should have much better thermal contact with the cooling thing. Why they chose plastic, I will never understand. It was guaranteed to fail.
I managed to put off getting a Mac for maybe another year. When this thing finally croaks, I don’t know what I’ll do. I have a million programs. I can’t even remember all of them. PC Study Bible, Word, Wordperfect, image programs, Mathcad, Firefox, you name it. I’ll forget I own half of them.
I am wondering if I should set up a RAID system. I’m going to look into it. I can’t imagine a thing like that running without causing problems. Surely it has to be slower.
I was up until the ungodly hour of 12:15 last night. I got up at 9:30. I hate that. But you know how computer problems are.
Now I have to clone my storage drive. Surely Bill Gates will permit me to do that without blowing up the PC or setting the house on fire. He makes things difficult these days, but I think I won a victory last night.
July 8th, 2009 at 10:03 AM
Just drill a couple of holes in the drive…or use the mill to make something cool out of it.
July 8th, 2009 at 10:14 AM
I was thinking muriatic acid.
July 8th, 2009 at 10:28 AM
Cheap plastic parts are a part of planned obsolescence, no?
.
MS wants you buying every couple of years, so they cluge up their software to make it big and require lots of chip speed/capacity to run, so that everyone else can cluge things up and you need a more pwerful machine quicker.
July 8th, 2009 at 10:48 AM
You can run all your PC programs on a Mac. Simply buy VMware Fusion and convert your old PC into a virtual machine under Fusion.
Initially you’ll continue to do everything inside the Fusion virtual machine, but eventually (and at your own pace) you can start taking advantage of the native Mac applications.
I do something similar at work. Our IT folks keep loading more and more security junk on the supported Windows XP image. So I run Windows under VMware Workstation to have access to all the corporate-supported applications and tools. But the bare metal runs Linux without all the painful slowness and whatnot.
Friends of mine swear by Parallels instead of VMware Fusion. I don’t have any personal experience with Parallels so I can’t recommend one over the other.
July 8th, 2009 at 11:15 AM
Anything you can do to physically damage the disks will make them unreadable by anyone who doesn’t have some pretty sophisticated techniques for data recovery (but then again, there are companies that you can send damaged disks to who have those techniques available). There are also programs you can run that will write garbage on the drive multiple times to begin the process of wiping the drive clean before you open it up and do your thing. (If you do anything that grinds or scrapes the surface, I’d recommend a breathing mask.)
July 8th, 2009 at 11:21 AM
Whoops, should have added: you pretty much have to physically damage the disks’ entire surfaces to get the job done completely. And I’m not sure muriatic acid would do the trick, because the disks are (or used to be) coated with a layer of “diamond-like carbon,” and I have no idea if it would react or what the reaction would be.
July 8th, 2009 at 11:29 AM
RE: old drives – look for a free program online called Eraser. It includes in it a utility called Boot-N-Nuke. You make a boot diskette (or CD) with BnN, hook up your old drive ONLY, boot with the diskette, it will OBLITERATE (beyond DoD standards) the data on any drives attached to the machine when it boots.
Side note – Eraser is a great windows program to just have running at all times. It adds an Erase option to your right-click menu (and other places like that). The erase option will overwrite deleted files with random data so that they are never recoverable. Again, meets or exceeds DoD standards.
As for the RAID system – look into a DROBO. It has a tiny bit of a premium price-wise, but is a very simple, home-user type RAID equivalent thingy-ma-bob. And you can control how much space it has by adding bigger drives as needed. You can also use drives of different sizes – it handles all that. Makes it super-simple for the non IT guy to do RAID at home. Check it out. (not affiliated with them at all, just LOVE the product).
July 8th, 2009 at 12:12 PM
There is also something called Windows Boot Camp (I think that’s right) and it would allow you to annoy hippies by using your mac to run Windows XP (or whatever OS you are using).
When I was forced to buy a mac, that was my plan until I realized the mac OS was better than XP and I went to the dark side.
July 8th, 2009 at 12:14 PM
I agree with Mumblix Grumph, above; yes, some uber-determined ultra hacker with access to several million dollars worth of extremely expensive equipment could probably resurrect a good deal of information off your drive. But who’s going to bother?
You’re a tool guy. Put a few nails through it with a nail gun, and problem solved. You could press that huge compressor of yours into service.
Or, grab a torch and heat the platters above their Curie point; as a rule of thumb, they’re there or beyond once they’re glowing dull red. No magnetic information of any kind left to recover.
July 8th, 2009 at 12:54 PM
Mac will set you free! I also have to use Windows for a couple of work-related things, and use VMware Fusion to run it on my Mac. Don’t be afraid of the “dark side!”
July 8th, 2009 at 3:46 PM
GatorGrater is right. The easiest way to completely remove all data is heat. You bought that acetylene torch that Og was pushing, right?
July 8th, 2009 at 4:21 PM
Having known people who’ve actually used data recovery services, I know they’re less expensive than you would think.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:58 PM
My guess is that running a zero fill program followed by opening up the hard drive and running a sheet of 40 grit sandpaper one revolution over each platter surface should do the trick. That’s what I do.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:25 PM
Taking drives apart can be enjoyable. All you really need is some teenytiny Torx® drivers, or you can cut slots in the screws using a Dremel tool.
Nowadays the platters are mostly glass — it’s the only thing that’s stiff enough to hold the tolerances. Take ’em out and smash ’em with a hammer.
Regards,
Ric
July 8th, 2009 at 6:08 PM
Large electromagnets used for erasing tape reels in radio stations would work on that drive just swell.
July 8th, 2009 at 8:09 PM
A RAID setup won’t cause you any speed problems. All the work is done with the RAID controller (the card that runs the setup). As far as your PC knows, it only sees and writes to a single drive, but you might have mirroring setup across two or more drives. The PC doesn’t care, the controller handles everything. No performance loss. We run all our servers at work with RAID.
July 9th, 2009 at 12:45 AM
My son, the UBERGEEK, uses old drives for target practice up in the mountains. It messes them up.
July 9th, 2009 at 2:13 PM
Just be glad you’re not this guy:
http://notalwaysright.com/hardware-lightly-sauteed-for-flavor
Did you see the inventor of the Captcha on Nova Science Now Tuesday night? He’s 30 year old Computer Science Professor Luis Von Ahn:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_von_Ahn
July 9th, 2009 at 2:23 PM
He didn’t invent it! He just killed Turing, hid the body, and took all the credit! I’m sure of it!
July 9th, 2009 at 6:25 PM
To bad you don’t have any firearms. You could – well, you know….
July 10th, 2009 at 8:42 AM
An uber cheap used microwave oven could take care of the data and be exciting to watch from a safe distance.