I’ve no idea how I ever had time to actually work for a living. I’ve heard other people say that and I can now witness that it was true. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do what I want to do around the house let alone go off to work somewhere. I’m sure I’ll eventually get the majority of the things needing to be done here at home finished, but the list is pretty long (and Nina hasn’t even added her items to my list, yet!).

One big deal for the past several days has been getting Nina’s laptop working once again. On Sunday morning she told me that her laptop had a blank screen and wouldn’t display anything. I sat down and heard the dreaded “click …. click … click …” coming from the computer hard drive. I checked on line and determined that the laptop was still under parts warranty. A few minutes later the Dell technician had a replacement hard drive ordered and said it would arrive on Tuesday. The technician’s name looked to be from India, but I did this all through a chat program on their support web page. I really like dealing with support through chat. Not only is it more understandable, but I have a complete record of what was said.

Meanwhile, Nina needed a computer. I moved the iMac Mini over to her desk and set her up with email and a web browser. She didn’t have her address book, but if anyone wrote, she could at least reply. That actually worked quite well. The replacement hard drive arrived on Tuesday and then it was time to recover the machine. That turned out to be somewhat of a difficult problem that took the next two days to do.

A little more than a year ago I bought a backup system for the computers in the office. It was from Simple Share (who have since been bought by someone) and included what looked to be pretty good software from EMC. I set up Nina’s laptop and my PC to do a weekly backup. The first one would take a long time, then from that point only changes would be backed up. I would occasionally check and the backups were being faithfully done. However, we went on the cruise to Norway and the 28th of June was the last backup from Nina’s laptop.

The first step was to re-install Windows XP and the EMC software. The replacement hard drive from Dell came with CD’s to install Windows … except they didn’t include the Dell drivers CD. That was a couple-hour on-line chat (again with someone from India) who gave me links to each of the needed drivers. Finally Windows was running. I then installed the EMC software. It couldn’t find the backups. It turns out that there is a catalog needed, which for some unfathomable reason, EMC stores on the local hard drive. So, when the hard drive goes dead, the catalog is gone as well. The process to rebuild the catalog was very painful and took more than twelve hours to crunch through.

But then it wouldn’t restore! Two attempts wrote a whole bunch of stuff to the new hard drive, but none of it was accessible. I finally tracked down what was left of Simple Share customer service and the guy was of absolutely no help. All he could do was assist in properly installing the software. He could do nothing more. Finally, after more than an hour on the phone with him, I finally got him to open a ticket with EMC so I could get support there without having to pay for it.

I don’t like EMC very much. They make very good storage … some of the most reliable disk storage in the business … but they are VERY expensive and beyond arrogant. If you don’t buy a service contract, then you must have a credit card available and pay a $79 per incident charge for assistance with their Retrospect backup and recovery software. However, finally Simple Share opened a ticket and I was able to bypass the per-incident charge from EMC. The support person was competent, but even more arrogant than I had dreamed possible. Obviously everything I had done was wrong. I had used their wizard to do the restore. That was wrong. I should have gone directly to advanced options and set up the restore manually. It turns out that the wizard always selects the wrong catalog! How in the world does an ordinary, non-computer-geek person successfully use this system???

After following his painstaking instructions and patiently putting up with his very long lecture, the restore started for the third time. It would take six hours and would completely overwrite the hard drive. In the middle, Nina and I went out to the movie theater for the new Harry Potter movie. The restore said it was done when we got home … but the message that the EMC support guy insisted that I would see was not there. I rebooted the computer as that was what he told me the instruction would say. The computer would not reboot and said that there was a serious configuration error and that I would need to reload the operating system. It was now 10 p.m. and I was about at the end of my patience.

I let it sit for a while while I did some other things and just thought about it. If the computer wouldn’t reboot because of a configuration error, then just perhaps the boot partition was corrupt?? I put in the Windows XP CD, booted to it, and went into rescue mode. That mode is a very arcane, command-line process with a few (and very few) commands available from the old MS-DOS days. One of the commands I remembered would repair a boot sector. I found the command and ran it. I didn’t have anything to loose … if it didn’t work I was going to have to start all over again anyway. Fortunately, I had downloaded all of the Dell drivers onto the iMac Mini, so I wouldn’t have to go through the process of getting them once again.

After running the boot repair program, I rebooted the computer. Voila! It booted! And everything was as it was on the 28 of June. The process was finished. The computer worked once again.

So, today I put Nina’s computer back on her desk and took away the iMac Mini. When I bought the Macbook, it came with a free printer, so I selected an HP All-in-One printer that is a scanner, copier, and printer. I installed that printer in place of the five-year-old HP scanner/printer/fax machine and got everything working. Nina is back in business and she is quite happy about that.

Now I need to set up her laptop to backup to the Simple Share system once again. I think I’ll do it more often than once a week. I also need to figure out how to have the catalog written to the Simple Share disk as well so I don’t have to recreate the catalog when the hard drive fails.

The good news is that there was a fairly recent backup. Further, the restore eventually worked and I think I could do it much more quickly next time. Most people I know, however, would not be able to make the restore work and probably would have difficulty setting up the backup! No wonder most people don’t have a backup of their PC. When the hard drive fails, everything is gone. Not a pleasant thought at all.

I’ve also been doing some yard work. The previous owners had dug a big hole on the north side of the house to catch the water run off when it rained because there was no grass. As they left and we moved in, they had the yard hydro seeded and the grass has come in and the “pond” is no longer needed. I had 4 1/2 yards of dirt delivered, enough to fill the hole and fill in a few other places in the yard. Most of that dirt is moved and I’ll start planting grass tomorrow. We’ve had some pretty serious thunderstorms the past couple of days and I don’t want all that dirt being washed away!

In addition I’ve been working on some electrical wiring in the motorhome so that we can put the TV in a different location when we’re traveling. That work isn’t quite done (I need to go get a part at an auto supply store). There won’t be time to finish it tomorrow and I think we’re going to Soda Springs on Saturday, then down to Heather’s on Monday and Tuesday.

We’re planning a BIG road trip … and plans are changing almost by the hour. The objective: go swimming at Hammonasset Beach State Park in Connecticut and visit everyone between here and there while we’re at it. In September we’ll go up the Seattle to visit folks up there. When Chandler finally gets consistently below 100 degrees we’ll go there to visit. In the meantime, the trip to Connecticut is being planned. Original thought: Two weeks. First Revision: Three Weeks. Current Revision: 25 days. But the current revision won’t work. It seems that Daryl will not be there on his allotted two days…. He’ll be in Salt Lake! So there will be at least one more revision and likely more than one. About the only thing I know right now is that we’ll leave on Sunday afternoon on August 5th and go to Green River to spend a bit of time with my favorite brother and his wife. From there, who knows. There just isn’t enough time to do everything we want to do!