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Showing posts from March, 2009

Hard drive crash and moving Vista

Well, I tried. I built a Vista x64 computer, with a new Intel i920, and a nVidia Quadro 5500 (which is 7xxx generation in game cards). It's very nice, but the Western Digital Black Caviar 1 Tb hard drive started to have bad sectors 2 months after first boot. I tried to follow these directions about moving Vista, but I was stymied. Don't get me wrong - it is very cool that you can drop to a command prompt using the Vista install DVD, and run all kinds of tools, diagnostics, and tests. The directions use 'diskpart' and 'robocopy' to move data and a Windows install from an old hard drive to a new one. I installed a Raid 1 array to replace the failing hard drive, and successfully copied the data, but I couldn't get Vista to 'repair' after copying to that Raid array. I put all the lurid details in a comment . Sometimes these examples of someone else succeeding or failing help me out a lot, so I try to contribute to the cloud.

Review: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright

Compelling, disturbing, surprising. It synthesizes a huge amount of information from other publications and documents, and hundreds of interviews by the author to give a clear portrait of Bin Laden and the organization he helped create. I was shocked by the clear presentation of the failure of information sharing between the CIA and FBI, and how a bit more cooperation could have lead the FBI to catch some of the 9/11 terrorists before the event. PBSwap page .