Antepenult
Oct. 3rd, 2004 08:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alfvaenGetting my computer stuff back together again is proving harder than I thought it would be.
First of all, something horked my Norton AntiVirus installation. It wouldn't go on "AutoProtect" mode at all, for one thing, or scan my email. Luckily I don't get many email viruses at my main email account. Since it was not, to the best of my knowledge, installed on my C: drive, I blame the computer consultant guys, who initially had some loony theory about a virus that had hollowed out NAV and was hiding inside it, or something. So I uninstalled it, as the Symantec Knowledge Base recommended, only to discover that my installation file had also been lost with D: drive. Am I going to have to shell out for a brand new copy? Well, I suppose it's probably close to time to renew my subscription anyway, but if I can dig out my original order information, maybe I can convince somebody to give me another copy.
Then there's the email folders I salvaged from D: drive. Outlook Express won't recognize half of them, even when I try to reimport them. I know that I save way too much email that I only very rarely want to refer to, maybe a little bit too compulsive, but it's annoying. Oddly, all or most of the folders that are gone are ones that my filters put email into, so it's all sitting in my Inbox for now.
This may, I've just realized, be linked to the most major problem--that the files I salvaged using Stellar Phoenix may not, in fact, have made it intact. In fact, more than one of them, especially the longer ones, seem to have acquired a certain case of sector-swapping, like a smashed FAT would cause. So some of the files I thought I'd saved, are not in fact saved. This is probably what happened to my email, now that I think about it--the mailboxes are probably not valid, because in the middle of one of the email messages it turns into a binary file or something, for one sector at least.
Thankfully, my book database file, a 5MB Access database, seems to be intact. I'm beginning to wonder if I should check for corruption in there, though, because some much shorter files have gotten toasted. One file, I had a copy that I had backed up at work, from three days earlier; I copied over it with the salvaged version, which was of course corrupt, and now I've lost much more than three days.
The most heartrending, though, is my Wheel of Time Concordance. I've been working on that for a long time now--possibly even back before the March 2003 backup, but at that point the file was on C:, and I only backed up D:, so it was never backed up, not even by scp'ing it to work. And it seems to be almost completely gone. Well, it was in two parts, a list of characters and a chapter-by-chapter synopsis. The character list may, possibly, be still there up to the R's, but the chapters are gone. And of course to even salvage the file I'd have to extract text strings from the .DOC file, since I did it in Microsoft Word to take advantage of outline format, unless Word has some kind of salvage feature.
I'd done the first four books of the series, and was several chapters into the fifth one. Now I can't bear the thought of going back to the beginning of the series again. I can barely even tolerate the thought of going back to the beginning of this book. Should I give up? Should I continue from this point in The Fires of Heaven and hope to one day come back to the beginning of the series again? Should I just put Robert Jordan aside for a while and go back to George R.R. Martin? I'd barely begun A Game of Thrones, and that file is slightly corrupted, but nowhere near as bad, and none of the text was actually lost. I haven't even checked most of the rest of the files yet. I'm not sure I want to know. Goddamn the smashed FAT. I'd like to back to two weeks ago and back up my entire D: drive before it started having problems. If I had a time machine...or if I had precognition. But I didn't and don't have either. Dammit.
Apart from that, I copied my old backups off of CD, and most of that is working. I decided to just reinstall Cygwin completely, though I forgot how long that all takes to do it the first time. The last time I did it, I ended up staying up until 1:30 AM or later, though to be fair, I was also reading Harry Potter & The Order of The Phoenix while watching the progress bars crawl across the screen. But I was able to use chmod to clear the annoying read-only flags that files acquire when burned onto CD, and retain when you copy them back.
Reinstalling The Sims, though, is proving more annoying. My computer thinks I already have them installed, so I have to try to uninstall them, but I can only do it one version at a time, and it keeps thinking that my CD drive is E:, instead of(because of the extra partition)F:. Sometimes it asks, but sometimes it just seems to assume. I guess I should go directly into the registry and delete the keys. I'm coming to learn just how badly most uninstall programs deal with the complete vanishment of the directory they installed to.
But my life will go on. I'll recover from the loss of data, and I'm sure I'll slack off in my backup habits again until I get burned again. (Heck, I haven't even really done my backups yet. It seems pointless, with so much corrupted and so much else freshly recopied in the first place. Maybe I should just zip and scp some more stuff to work.) I didn't lose everything, and I suppose I should be thankful for that.
First of all, something horked my Norton AntiVirus installation. It wouldn't go on "AutoProtect" mode at all, for one thing, or scan my email. Luckily I don't get many email viruses at my main email account. Since it was not, to the best of my knowledge, installed on my C: drive, I blame the computer consultant guys, who initially had some loony theory about a virus that had hollowed out NAV and was hiding inside it, or something. So I uninstalled it, as the Symantec Knowledge Base recommended, only to discover that my installation file had also been lost with D: drive. Am I going to have to shell out for a brand new copy? Well, I suppose it's probably close to time to renew my subscription anyway, but if I can dig out my original order information, maybe I can convince somebody to give me another copy.
Then there's the email folders I salvaged from D: drive. Outlook Express won't recognize half of them, even when I try to reimport them. I know that I save way too much email that I only very rarely want to refer to, maybe a little bit too compulsive, but it's annoying. Oddly, all or most of the folders that are gone are ones that my filters put email into, so it's all sitting in my Inbox for now.
This may, I've just realized, be linked to the most major problem--that the files I salvaged using Stellar Phoenix may not, in fact, have made it intact. In fact, more than one of them, especially the longer ones, seem to have acquired a certain case of sector-swapping, like a smashed FAT would cause. So some of the files I thought I'd saved, are not in fact saved. This is probably what happened to my email, now that I think about it--the mailboxes are probably not valid, because in the middle of one of the email messages it turns into a binary file or something, for one sector at least.
Thankfully, my book database file, a 5MB Access database, seems to be intact. I'm beginning to wonder if I should check for corruption in there, though, because some much shorter files have gotten toasted. One file, I had a copy that I had backed up at work, from three days earlier; I copied over it with the salvaged version, which was of course corrupt, and now I've lost much more than three days.
The most heartrending, though, is my Wheel of Time Concordance. I've been working on that for a long time now--possibly even back before the March 2003 backup, but at that point the file was on C:, and I only backed up D:, so it was never backed up, not even by scp'ing it to work. And it seems to be almost completely gone. Well, it was in two parts, a list of characters and a chapter-by-chapter synopsis. The character list may, possibly, be still there up to the R's, but the chapters are gone. And of course to even salvage the file I'd have to extract text strings from the .DOC file, since I did it in Microsoft Word to take advantage of outline format, unless Word has some kind of salvage feature.
I'd done the first four books of the series, and was several chapters into the fifth one. Now I can't bear the thought of going back to the beginning of the series again. I can barely even tolerate the thought of going back to the beginning of this book. Should I give up? Should I continue from this point in The Fires of Heaven and hope to one day come back to the beginning of the series again? Should I just put Robert Jordan aside for a while and go back to George R.R. Martin? I'd barely begun A Game of Thrones, and that file is slightly corrupted, but nowhere near as bad, and none of the text was actually lost. I haven't even checked most of the rest of the files yet. I'm not sure I want to know. Goddamn the smashed FAT. I'd like to back to two weeks ago and back up my entire D: drive before it started having problems. If I had a time machine...or if I had precognition. But I didn't and don't have either. Dammit.
Apart from that, I copied my old backups off of CD, and most of that is working. I decided to just reinstall Cygwin completely, though I forgot how long that all takes to do it the first time. The last time I did it, I ended up staying up until 1:30 AM or later, though to be fair, I was also reading Harry Potter & The Order of The Phoenix while watching the progress bars crawl across the screen. But I was able to use chmod to clear the annoying read-only flags that files acquire when burned onto CD, and retain when you copy them back.
Reinstalling The Sims, though, is proving more annoying. My computer thinks I already have them installed, so I have to try to uninstall them, but I can only do it one version at a time, and it keeps thinking that my CD drive is E:, instead of(because of the extra partition)F:. Sometimes it asks, but sometimes it just seems to assume. I guess I should go directly into the registry and delete the keys. I'm coming to learn just how badly most uninstall programs deal with the complete vanishment of the directory they installed to.
But my life will go on. I'll recover from the loss of data, and I'm sure I'll slack off in my backup habits again until I get burned again. (Heck, I haven't even really done my backups yet. It seems pointless, with so much corrupted and so much else freshly recopied in the first place. Maybe I should just zip and scp some more stuff to work.) I didn't lose everything, and I suppose I should be thankful for that.
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-03 08:32 pm (UTC)Now if the server crashed, and all underline info was lost...heads would roll.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-03 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-04 01:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-04 10:06 pm (UTC)