Tips, Tricks, and Tales from the Techs

Over a period of a week or two you realize your computer is freezing constantly.  You check for obvious signs of hardware failure, like bloated motherboard capacitors, and check the cabling.  You take a look at the Windows event viewer (type “eventvwr” in the run command) and under the system you notice a lot of hard drive errors.

After running a utility like HD Tune you realize your hard drive is on the fritz.  If it’s something like a bad block, it can be “repaired” by reformatting you machine as Windows will write around this block and be marked as bad on a clean install.  However a lot of times this is caused by something like the head of the hard drive causing damage to the platter, which usually means it’ll happen again.

So the best course of action is to replace that hard drive.  Today we’ll be looking at what you should do for a typical hard drive failure on a desktop PC.”

1) Order a new hard drive.

Simple enough.  It doesn’t have to be the exact same one, just make sure the bus in the same (IDE, SATA) and get the same size or larger drive to avoid any problems down the road.

2) Transfer your data to a new location.

While your waiting for the UPS guy to ring your doorbell, transfer all the data you have off the hard drive to a new one.  The best way is to boot your computer from a UBCD4Win CD and run the Unstoppable Copier from it.  Copy the ENTIRE drive to either an external hard drive, another hard drive on your computer, or a network location (such as a shared folder on another computer or a server if you have access to one).  Grab some lunch it might take a while.  Subway is good.

3) Install and format your your new hard drive.

I don’t really need to say too much about installing a new hard drive do I?  Just swap the old one out and put the new one in.  Boot into UBCD4Win again to format the drive.  Right click on “My Computer” and select “Manage”.  In the Computer Managment window click on Disk Management.

The new hard drive should look like Disk 1 (however yours should be Disk 0 if it’s the only drive), it should be unallocated and void of anything.  Right click on it and click “Format”.  Run through the wizard and format as a logical drive with a primary partition.  Name your hard drive (”Local Disk” is the norm) and check it to do a “Quick Format”.  After the wizard is complete, UBCD will say you need to reboot.  I’ve always avoided this by running through the format wizard again.  Right click the drive and mark the drive as active.  After that you should be able to right click on the drive that is showing at the top of the window and assign in the drive letter “C”.  Go to My Computer and voila!  Your hard drive is ready to be written to.

4) Transfer your data to the new hard drive

Run Unstoppable Copier again and copy your data from where you saved it to the new hard drive.  Grab some lunch again.

5) Rebuild your boot.ini

After everything is done, reboot your computer and see if it loads.  If it doesn’t you might have to rebuild your boot.ini file.  This is especially true on Dell machines that have that little 50mb partition before the OS partition.   Boot up UBCD4Win and at the main blue screen before you boot into your BartPE OS (the shell you are in when using UBCD) scroll down and launch the Windows Recovery Console.  It’ll take a few minutes to boot, just follow the prompts on the screen when Windows setup asks what you want t do.  When you are in select your windows installation and enter the local administrator password (if you can’t remember it or don’t know it you can use the password tools in your UBCD to create a new one).   At the command prompt type “bootcfg /rebuild”.  Enter these options:

Add installation to boot list?: Yes
Enter Load Identifier:  Microsoft Windows (XP Home, Pro, Vista, Home, Business, Ultimate, whatever the name of your OS is)
Enter Operating System Load Options: (leave blank)

Type exit to reboot the machine.
There you have it.  Windows should now boot properly and everything should look the way it did before.  Windows might ask to reboot itself after it install you new hard drive drivers, so do so.  If you are still having problems you might want to use the “fixboot” and “fixmbr” commands at the Recovery Console in case something messed up during your data transfers.  The disaster you thought you had on your hands, wasn’t that bad was it?

Kevin Hardware, Tips and Tricks

If you’re a web developer you’re bound to come across this. You just designed a great looking web page that excels your expectations.  It’s looks greats, is easy to navigate, and you know it’s going to knock your client off his feet.  You go to preview it in Firefox and it looks perfect, just as it did in the web editor your designed it in.  You publish your site to the web, sit back and relax.  You’re just waiting for the praises from the person who trusted you to put them on the web.

In about three minutes you get a all for the client and you become the one who gets knocked off his feet.  They complain the text is overlapping different parts of the page it shouldn’t, some of the links don’t work, and there’s a blue transparent film around some of the images.

You quickly fire off Firefox and go to the website, but all looks normal.  You are perplexed until it hits you.  They are using Internet Explorer.

Besides being a haven for rogue toolbars that won’t uninstall, spyware, and one of the slowest browsers out there, Internet Explorer also doesn’t support web standards like other browsers do.  It doesn’t have the support for CSS, tables, images (like PNGs), and other elements that Firefox has.

So don’t use Firefox to test your websites, not because it’s a bad browser, but because it’s an awesome browser, created by people who really care about the needs and methods of web developers.  It’s not that Microsfoft is evil (we at STC really like Microsoft), it’s just that they really don’t focus on IE like they should.  Internet Explorer also has the largest market share (even though they are steadily losing it) and most people who view your site will be rendering your page in it.

So next time you need to see if there are any subtle hidden “flaws” in your website, don’t use Firefox.  Firefox is too nice and cares about your feelings.

Kevin Tips and Tricks, Web Development