My dad was having trouble with his laptop – for some reason whoever installed the OEM version of Windows XP Pro on it (I don’t know if it was Acer or NCIX) decided to divide the disk space into two equally sized FAT32 partitions.

That created several problems. FAT32 is not known for its resliancy when Windows is not shut down nicely. It was impossible to even back up from one partition to the other because FAT32 can only store files up to 4G. The main partition where “My Documents” was located filled up so much it was impossible to defragment the drive.

And anyone can attest that it is a total nuisance for most people to try and store their data on a second partition, because most programs want to store files in “My Documents”. Tools like TweakUi only work so well.

It was a long process to convert the partitions to NTFS and merge them into one.

Step 1: Connect to a network drive (my mac) not running FAT32 so that a file greater than 4G can be stored.

Step 2: Backup the two partions to the network drive in case something goes wrong.

Step 3: Safely move the MSOCache data of the second FAT32 partition to the first one. . This was some data that came preinstalled on the second partition to discourage ACER users from merging the two partitions. If you don’t safely move this data, you may have trouble with Microsoft Office.

Step 4: user convert.exe to convert the primary partition to NTFS. That will require a few reboots.

Step 5: Create a BootitNG Install disk.

Step 6: Install BootitNG (let it choose the partition), extend the primary NTFS partition to use up free space.

Step 7. Reboot to Windows and make sure everything works.

Step 8. Set bootitng to boot Windows, then uninstall BootitNG.

That was a lot of work to deal with getting Windows set up in a reliable and easy to use and maintain configuration.

Technorati Tags: windows, bootitng

My dad and I spent an hour trying to backup his laptop with NTBackup. It kept hanging, so we guessed the problem might have been the Norton virus checker. Sure enough, disabling Norton Internet Security allowed NT Backup to make some progress (at which point ntbackup failed, because FAT32 can only store files up to 4G).

A program which prevents your backups from working, in my opinion, is malware. It would take a reasonably adept user to guess their virus checker is preventing their system from working properly.

Technorati Tags: malware, norton, security, windows, backup, ntbackup, fat32

From Teenagers Are Ignorant:

The world’s misfortune is less the cause of Snidely Whiplash than of Noam Chomsky-types

Technorati Tags: noam chomsky, chomsky, economics

I wrote awhile back that I had stopped using youtube, I have found it convenient to have my videos available on the web. Most of the folks who want to see my vides have subscribed via foldershare, but not all.

I have found posting videos on youtube a total nuiscance typical of a web based interface. You have to create some titles, categorize, tag, select file from a tree, and upload videos one by one, and wait for them to complete.

Noticeably absent from the list of Amazing Youtube Tools is an uploader tool. I would like to tag and title the video on my mac, maybe using spotlight or even ITunes, and simply indicate I would like the video on youtube. Somehow in the background, my video would be reliably uploaded to youtube, whether I log in or our of my machine, the internet connection is interrupted, etc. Youtube could probably save themselves a ton of processing power by providing this tool, which could potentially convert the video to their internal format on the fly as the upload proceeds.

Technorati Tags: youtube