Disaster Recovery

It's been a while. I've been called all sorts of nasty names for not updating in ten whole days. But here I am, fulfilling the promise made in my 11th June entry (which, contrary to popular misinterpretation, I have not broken, James).

So what of the title? The disasters (there were two) were PC-related and so the technologically fainthearted are advised to skip to the last few paragraphs.

The first disaster was two weekends ago. Having gone home with the express intention of revising for a Functional Programming exam, I somehow came to open Windows's hard disk management thingy on my "left at home because taking two PCs to uni seemed excessive" PC. Spotting three gigs of unused space (shock horror) where a shiny new partition could be, I hastily clicked "Create". Everything seemed normal. Then a message box: "The Logical Disk Server threw an exception." Then something called "Windows" access-violated. Not "EXPLORER.EXE" or "MMC.EXE". "Windows". I deduced that all was not well.

And I was right. Upon reloading said disk management thingy, I saw the 40Gb drive was now reported as a 16 terabyte (16,000Gb) leviathan. Whee. And where my F: partition and six Linux partitions had been, there were now apparently eight unknown partitions of 2 terabytes each. Awesome.

Needless to say, the machine would no longer boot. The partition table, while mostly fried, still contained valid entries for C: and D:, but the system uses the GRUB bootloader, which was living on one of the now inaccessible Linux partitions.

The most obvious first course of action was to get Windows back, and that was easy. Pop in a Windows CD, boot to the recovery console, FIXBOOT and FIXMBR - sorted. That overwrote the orphaned GRUB stub with a Windows bootsector, and within minutes I was back into Windows. I considered stopping there - after all, I had backups of most of the stuff on the missing F: partition, and I couldn't recall anything important I'd stored on the Linux partitions, although reinstalling the whole thing again was going to be tiresome.

Some mysterious force (revision avoidance) made me download a disk editor and start looking around. Google found me some helpful docs on the layout of partition tables and NTFS, FAT and ext2 boot sectors. To cut a rather boring story long (rather than excruciatingly long), some five hours later I had located the starting sector of each of the missing partitions, calculated, checked and rechecked their offsets, and thus reconstructed the partition tables by hand with a hex editor. I was then able to access the Linux installation by booting from the Red Hat disc (which had previously claimed that Linux was not installed) where I reinstalled GRUB. And after a prayer and a nervous reboot, everything was exactly as it had been before my fateful play with Windows's hapless partition editor.

I allow myself some good, honest geek satisfaction at having bounced back from a computing catastrophe that a few years ago would have had me reaching for the FORMAT command. Sorry if the story bored you to tears :-)

The second disaster occurred towards the end of last week, and while it continued on the theme of hard disks, it moved a few layers closer to the machine. Drive failure. A routine surface scan of my IBM Deskstar (or "Deathstar") revealed a handful of damaged clusters in some large Radiohead videos that I had downloaded that day. Soon, bad sectors were spawning like baddies in a 1994 FPS, damaging bits of NTFS itself and leaving Scandisk unable to get far enough to check for more. So I downloaded IBM's Drive Fitness Test utility and let it scan. For hours. It returned an interesting error code - description "Defective Unit - Excessive Shock". Excessive shock?! As the PC hadn't moved an inch in nine weeks, this was worrying. Are IBM programming their drives to lie to cut down on warranty returns, or did someone come in and give my PC a good kicking while I was down the corridor?

Anyway, a shiny new Seagate Barracuda is on its way from ebuyer, which is going to help make this fortnight a bloody expensive one, as I just took delivery of an equally shiny new laptop (upon which this very entry is being crafted). Time to start sourcing some summer work. In the meantime, the stricken PC is still working, sort of. The damage seems to be spreading slowly backwards from the far end of the drive, meaning that my source code partition is dying, but my system drive is, digits entwined, still very much alive. I'm hoping it'll last long enough for me to install the new drive and simply clone the surviving partitions, negating the need for a Windows reinstallation.

*** START READING AGAIN HERE IF YOU SKIPPED THE TECHIE STUFF ***

Now, in brief closing, I turn to so-called "real life" events. Last weekend I went home to pick up the new laptop, and elected to stay overnight. The following afternoon I fell ill with some random annoying virus, and ended up staying for three more days. I returned to an atmosphere of faint pointlessness, with exams out of the way and a campus united in the search for new ways to waste days. Charles has been running around with Jo and Moz organising the BandSoc stage for Monday's RAG festival, The Big Easy, over at Cryfield. Charles's new blog has many tales of the logistical nightmares they're facing. We (Unreal Coriander) are playing second from last (before headliners The Fire), with Russ on drums (as Mark isn't around) and our newest recruit, Becky, on cello(!). Should be fun...

Also notable gig-wise is tonight's return of The Stolen to The Tiller Pin in Leamington. I've got a reasonable number of uni people coming to see us, and maybe Josh and Sam as well, so we'd better be good. I'm trying not to worry about not having rehearsed with them for weeks. Anyway, we're on sometime after 8pm until about 10.30. If you're a uni person and want to come, speak to Charles, who's leading the expedition to (re-)locate the place.

Ceri and Ben came over yesterday for an unofficial tour of campus and lunch in Xanana's. Charles managed to find us a convoluted way into the biology department avoiding all the locked doors, so she got to see rather a lot considering it was a Saturday. After that, a rehearsal, then transporting a dozen large sheets of hardboard from Health Centre Road to the Cryfield sports pavillion, using nothing but a rickety trolley provided graciously by Warwick Hospitality. Cue daring downhill trolley rides on the way home. And come 10pm, we went to the Offbeat disco in Zippy's, drank far too much, and engaged in much stupid dancing.

This brings us shakily up to date. Right now there's a thunderstorm in progress. Excitement.

I have to get myself and all of my junk out of here by 10am on Saturday morning. Six short days of "campus life" left.

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... + (n-2) + (n-1) + n

Tomorrow's exam is my last, and I've taken a short break from cramming to apologise to my modest handful of regular visitors for not having written anything in ages. After tomorrow, update frequency will indeed return to normal, I promise. And I have lots to write about. Bet y'all can't wait.

Of course, updates or no updates, you may not be able to get here anyway. The server has been enduring a sustained denial-of-service attack for well over two days now [details], so if this page took a while to load, I apologise (again).

Back now to my personal crash course in Standard ML. No rest for the lecture avoidist :-)

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d00m

Lack of updates due to extreme cram^H^H^H^Hrevision. Near-normal service will resume after I have failed maths tomorrow.

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Liquid Tension Experiment

I'm listening to Liquid Tension Experiment Vol. 2, 74 minutes of saturated prog metal instrumentals by the side project band of Dream Theater's lead guitarist, drummer and keyboardist. It's awesome stuff. The kind I'd love to have a go at creating, if I had (a few!) years' more keyboard experience, and knew guitarists and a drummer who were similarly enthusiastic for writing desperately obscure self-indulgence that most people wouldn't listen to if you paid them :-)

Josh, I don't know if you're still reading this on a regular basis, but there are a couple of tracks off LTE2 that I really need to send you.

Speaking of fine music, a report on last night's Radiohead experience will follow tonight, or later.

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Syndication Wars

For the sake of compliance with yet another random standard (and to get another pretty "valid" banner for my site), clunkyblog now sports RSS syndication support. And I said it wasn't going to suffer feature bloat. Oh well. For anyone who knows what I'm talking about, the URL for the feed is:

http://www.m3fe.com/clunkyblog_rss.php

If you have a LiveJournal, you can add this feed to your Friends page by going here and entering either the above URL, or the account name paul_roberts. My blog entries will then appear on your Friends page as if I was using LiveJournal too. Clever, that.

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Unclean 2

Swopped the Colosseum for a surreal night at Varsity. Met lots of randoms.

Further to my recent post about virus-writing, it seems one Canadian university is braver than I am. It sounds like something of a publicity stunt to me, though. "Whoah, man! We gotta go to Calgary and write viruses!" Frankly, I can't see how letting some students play with some old email worms is going to "delve into the cybercrime mind" at all.

"The course is open to 16 fourth-year students who must work under strict conditions in a secure lab cut off from Internet and cell- phones. Other security measures to thwart students who may have malicious intent are in the works."

Like any student who had the knowhow and inclination to develop a worm would want or need to sign up to their silly course anyway. This Slashdot post says what I'm thinking.

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Unclean

Y'know, it's strangely tempting to write a devastatingly pervasive all-rounder virus/worm hybrid with some kind of vaguely internet-crippling payload.

Why? The intellectual challenge, I suppose. It's a try-to-do-better-than thing. The majority of new nasties seem to be fairly lame - with the occasional exception, they're buggy, or they're strong in certain areas but very weak in others. And decent polymorphism appears to have all but died out - the moment Symantec et al get hold of a specimen, the virus is ultimately doomed. A worm that combined the "best" features of many of its predecessors, and then some, tested to the hilt, would be highly likely to survive in the wild.

I wonder if the act of actually writing a virus is illegal yet, or if, as the Dr Solomon told us in his lecture a few weeks ago, you can only be prosecuted if you actually release one.

Either way, I fancy doing some research into "fully" polymorphic executables. Maybe as my third year project. I can't think of any non-malicious applications for such a technology yet, but I'm sure there are some :-)

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No, I won't fix your computer (well, unless you buy me sweets)

I eradicated the Palyh email worm from Charles's computer last night. Mildly interesting because it's a brand new one and Norton didn't recognise it, and nor did Google. It sucked though - only took five minutes to analyse and defeat.

And Gabriella bought me fruit gums for utterly failing to retrieve her [corrupted / deleted / lost in the digital ether] essay :-)

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Education (We Don't Need No)

So, I've chosen my few optional modules for next year, supplementing the god-awful selection of dry, prehistoric core courses that I'll be forced to endure. I've chosen Numerical Algorithms (ick), Introduction to Business Studies (haha), and saving the best for last, Russian For Scientists I :-)

I haven't written my presentation for Thursday's 9am seminar yet. Still, I taught myself some maths today. And fought with PCI cards and IRQs for half an hour. I now enjoy superior audio performance. And we went to Rootes Reception to tell them that water was a-drippin' through Kate's ceiling. Some girl upstairs had a shower with the curtain on the wrong side of the bath. The ph00l.

The corridor is all dark because every second light is off. This curious phenomenon, unrelated to the flood, is repeated in corridors all over the building. Is it some psychologically motivated mood lighting trick, or are Warwick Hospitality just trying new ways to save money?

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Xanana

Kate and I are in the union's Cafe Xanana, wasting time. One of the staff just tried to give us more food. I long for sausage and onion. I see Russ and his girlfriend, a gay couple, another couple, another couple, and a random. It's so damned coupley in here, in fact, that I may have to go and write my presentation on Private Email in the Workplace instead.

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