Dinner/Agony/Success/Dishwasher/VMWare-XP-Printer

As I read the title above it makes it sound like dinner gave me some sort of bowel issue :(...

Dinner

Well Dinner last night was fun, the group was from a previous employer, all of us either resigned, were fired or laid off. It was fun to get together and be bitter about our old boss :). It was even more fun to see everyone together and see their successes in new positions. Only two of us haven't found new full-time positions yet, but we're looking!

Agony

Well I'm going through my daily morning routine around 6am of checking emails/job sites/applying the latest Microsoft Service Patch to my laptop. After the patches were installed I was asked to reboot my laptop (which I happily did). During reboot I got the ugly error c:\windows\system32\c_437.nls was corrupted and I should try retrieving the file from my install disk, Drats!

The laptop is a Lenovo T60, it's a nice little machine actually, but the install disks install all or nothing or assume that you have a backup (yeah right, what world do they live in?), so I went to the install disk for my Dell (which is labeled "Dell", but it's a MS install disk), well my T60 has a SATA drive, XP won't see SATA drives (very sad), so I had to change my BIOS to run the SATA drive in compatability mode (which reminds me I need to switch that bit back). I got to the hard drive via the XP Setup Recovery application, now to get important files off the machine (such as my email folder and my current work files), but I can't connect to the network or to my USB thumb drive (I could read the thumb drive, but not write to it, very odd). Finally I tried restoring the file (seems there have been other people up on the web with the same problem, so Google quickly gave me the answer I wanted), that's when I got the message that it not only couldn't find the file, but it couldn't find the directory the file was in (which was odd, because I was in the directory), of course this means I've got very bad sectors on the drive and probably have a drive that's going south quickly (I called Lenovo, I spoke with Mark in Atlanta, he was increadibly helpful and promised to send out a new drive for next day delivery). So on to Plan B!

Success

I rebooted the machine in the Rescue and Recovery mode for the laptop, I found that I was connected to the internet now, I could even map network drives, but I couldn't browse anyting (bad...), after clicking around I found that via the "Rescue Files" option I could copy the files I needed off my machine (it's been doing that for many hours now, since around 7am and it's 10:45am now), I'm moving everything to a USB drive on my Ubuntu Server (then I'll make 2 more copies onto other machines). I have been able to get my mail and work files off (I'm able to use them on my Vista machine). Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to get my new drive install the OS on the laptop for the second time in 2 weeks and have a nice and happy machine again.

Dishwasher

My other piece of hardware that's gone south is my Dishwasher, after fiddling with it some and getting the major leak it had develop to stop, I noticed a few days later that it had started leaking again :(, my best theory is that the heater coil, which has a nice crack down it's length, is warping when it gets hot and causing the gasket that's holding it into the diswasher to work loose. So I ordered a new coil ($45 for next day delivery from Sears, where Lenovo seems to have the customer's best interest in mind, I'm going to have to start thinking about shopping from Sears, at least for big ticket items, I shouldn't complain too much, they replace the 12 year old axe that broke for free), which should be coming in today, I will then be able to hopefully install the coil and have a dishwasher that's nice and happy again. I've become somewhat of a coil expert with this issue :).

VMWare-XP-Printer

Well I should also mention that after so proudly saying that I got an XP print server running on my Ubutu box via VMWare, seems that I've run into a snag. It seems that when I try to print on that machine I get a very nasty BSD on the virtual XP machine, so I've shelved that idea for a little bit. I should also mention that I had problems getting VMWare to see the USB devices, but after a bit of research I found a way to mount the USB devices so VMWare could see them.