What to do when a drive shows some flakiness

A friend asked what I do when a drive throws a sector error. Do I junk the drive?

The answer is "no", but I do torture it. I did a lighter version of this recently when I started hearing suspicious "whirrrrrrr - tick" sounds from a laptop drive (seek error sounds). Here's the full OS X regimen; the XP response is pretty similar (scandisk instead of Disk Utility, etc).

1. Do a mirror backup (Carbon Copy Cloner, etc) and a Retrospect backup (that's what I use routinely).
2. Test with Disk Utility.
3. Run Apple's drive diagnostic in loop mode (hardware test).
4. Reformat using a secure format (write 0s, so it write tests every sector).
5. Test with Disk Utility.
6. Restore from mirror backup.
7. Test with Disk Utility.
   

If you start in the morning you can probably get it done within a day. Replacing the drive takes longer than a day, so even if a replacement were free this is worth doing. If the drive passes step 2 it will likely pass all the tests, so the chance of wasting a lot of time is pretty low.

See also (XP centric): Gordon's Tech: Lessons from another XP disk crash

Power a digital camera when outlets are unpredictable

Ben Long has written a good essay on remote power solutions for a dSLR, including solar options. I've asked him (comments) how he approaches backup in these settings. Does he use a battery operated CF to CF copying solution?

FriendFeed: what's the point?!

I tried FriendFeed:

Keep Track of Your Friends' Shared Items: "FriendFeed is a start-up that wants to solve this issue by letting you enter your usernames from different sites and combining all the data in a single feed that could be easily shared with someone. You can also invite your friends and subscribe to their data. The service makes a lot of sense if you use it from a social network like Facebook, so FriendFeed has a Facebook application."

I don't get it. I was able to add one of my blogs as a feed, but I could only see how to add a single blogger feed. I don't see how to delete a FriendFeed account, once you have one it's there forever.

There's probably more than I can see, but if there is more then they have serious usability problem.

Don't bother.

Making the gmail POP migration - tricky settings

My local ISP is visi.com, I've used their email services for many years. They changed management recently however, and I don't care for their new procedures. I've decided to move away from their services; that meant my pop services needed to migrate to gmail.

Gmail is already my primary email workplace, I use Eudora primarily for maintaining a local archive. So this migration was really more sensible than my old forward from Gmail setup.

It took me a while to get Eudora working with gmail -- I kept getting timeout errors. I had no trouble with OS X Mail.app, so I figured I was missing something in my configuration. Turns out I had two errors:

1. I had to require eudora use its "alternate" port (be nice if Eudora simply let me set the port address) for both send and receive.
2. Leave mail on server must be unchecked.

I like how it works. In particular:

1. It doesn't matter whether I archive email or leave it in the inbox - it comes across when I access the pop service.
2. If I send mail from eudora it's saved as sent email both in eudora and gmail.
   

If I send email from Gmail, it's not picked up by Eudora. So when I want to save a copy in my home archive I send it to my old visi account, there a redirect sends back to my Gmail inbox. The next time I do a pop check the message is saved to my home archive.

Overall it's a nice improvement. I mostly use Gmail and delete whatever I don't care to keep, so this will reduce the amount I store in my home archive.

OS X "character palette" - use symbols in OS X

Years ago I put the character palette on my OS X menu bar ...

To activate this, open the International preference pane and click on the Input Menu tab. Select the check boxes next to Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer. Then select the Show Input Menu In Menu Bar option. Your region’s flag should appear in the menu bar. Click on this flag to access a menu where you can choose to open the Character Palette or the Keyboard Viewer.

I've not done much with it though. For example, if I put α into this Firefox post box, will it display properly in XP? How about ❝fancier quotes❞? Could I start writing café?

I guess I'll find out when I view this post tomorrow. Carleton college, btw, explains how to use the "favorites" feature, but it does look like I can only add favorites one character at a time.

Keyboards for Macs - don't toss the old ones

Keyboards, a longstanding Macintouch report thread, is a great source of info on Apple keyboards. Years ago I tossed out some superb old-style Mac kbs thinking they were worthless. I didn't know about the Griffin USB to ADB converter. It pains me to recall how great they were.

I don't like any of Apple's desktop keyboards at all. Sooner or later I'll bite the bullet and make do with a PC keyboard.

XP: Recent lessons from the dark side

[see update about the two "versions" of WDS and a later update as the saga continued ...]

At home I sail the often calm waters of OS X. At work I fight the fury of the storm, trapped in the XP triangle.

Now, it must be admitted that if my Dell XP laptop were sentient I'd be condemned as a cruel master. I torture the darned thing. I know few who see as much of XP and Office's brittle nastiness as I. Maybe if I treated OS X the way I do XP it would break to. (Vista? You're joking, right?)

That said, a recent flurry of cascading messes taught me a new lesson and reminded me of old ones.

1. Sometime in the past few weeks my 75GB drive suddenly had only 9GB free. It's dangerous to fall below 20% free space on a heavily used XP or OS X system, and I think this was one of the "straws" that pushed my XP system from its usual metastable state to accelerating collapse. In retrospect I'd somehow ended up with a 5GB orphaned pagefile.sys. I couldn't see it, because I somehow had Explorer configured to not show system files [12]. I eliminated the orphaned pagefile.sys by accident [1], but I think if I'd had Explorer showing me system files I'd have seen it, and dealt with it. New lesson: always display the hidden files so you can track pagefile.sys.
2. A combination of Windows Desktop Search [5], an unstable corporate network with intermittent Exchange connectivity failure, a 3.5 GB Outlook PST file [11], severe disk fragmentation [2], bugs with Outlook 2003 [3], my use of Microsoft's Onfolio [4], my insanely persistent use of Palm synchronization [6], Microsoft's Live Meeting Outlook Add-in [7] finally led to a system meltdown with increasingly odd Outlook behavior and, finally, OST corruption.
3. Good news: no covert alerts of drive read/write errors in XP's monitoring tools (XP quietly tracks many disk failures without notifying even admin users) and no chdksk/scandisk/whatever-it's-called-now problems.

So now my OST file was corrupt. Happily, that's usually not a big deal and it wasn't this time either. I turned off WDS (I snoozed indexing but I think I should have disabled the indexing service using XP's service manager - it kept trying to return to life) and found my OS file in "C:\Documents and Settings\[user_id]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook". I renamed it and restarted Outlook, which then rebuilt my OST file from the Exchange Server. The new version was about 7MB smaller than the old one (103MB) but I seemed to have everything -- including some old tasks that suddenly reappeared from the twilight zone. I then ran my series of Outlook clean-up switches [9]

/cleandmrecords
Deletes the logging records saved when a manager or a delegate declines a meeting.
/cleanfreebusy
Clears and regenerates free/busy information. This switch can only be used when you are able to connect to your Microsoft Exchange server.
/cleanprofile
Removes invalid profile keys and recreates default registry keys where applicable.
/cleanreminders
Clears and regenerates reminders.
/resetfolders
Restores missing folders for the default delivery location.

DANGER (don't run this one unless you need it):
/resetnavpane
Clears and regenerates the Navigation Pane for the current profile. This will vaporize your Outlook Shortcut pane

When all was done I restarted WDS and had it rebuild its index from scratch, then I set my Palm sync to have Outlook overwrite the Palm.

Another fun lunchtime with Microsoft ...

------------- footnotes --------------------

[1]I removed my cache to free up enough space to run defrag, and when I restored a fixed 2GB cache the system asked if I wanted to delete an old pagefile.sys. Then my free space reappeared. A new 160GB high speed drive is on order.

[2] XP won't defrag when free space is less than 15%. OS X is much less prone to serious fragmentation.

[3] Still, it's much better than its predecessor.

[4] XP has the world's best blog writer, Windows Live Writer, but XP's corporate-friendly blog readers are very weak - and getting worse. Onfolio was the best, but Microsoft has left it to fester post acquisition. I fear it's becoming increasingly unsafe. OS X has the opposite problem -- lousy authoring tools, great readers. Of course OS X can also run WLW in a VM ...

[5] Really, I need all this stuff. But WDS is trying to index 4GB of Outlook and hundreds of thousands of system files.

[6] If you're not a Palm addict, I beg you, don't start. Life with Palm and Outlook/Exchange is like juggling antimatter, and it gets worse all the time.

[7] Ok, so this is another straw on that broken back. I am very suspicious of that plug-in and how it impacts Outlook/Exchange behavior with an unreliable network.

[8] This is typical of whenever I regenerate Outlook's OST file. Something old always reappears, it's never been important. Bugs.

[9] I do them one at a time exiting Outlook after each one.

[10] Outlook 2003's Shorcut pane is a "pain in the ***". So dumb, yet so essential in a complex Outlook configuration.

[11] This is why WDS is not an option.

[12] This is the default setting, but I always change it. Not this time apparently.

Update 9/28/07: Wow. Microsoft is in such bad shape. After all of the above I discovered Windows Desktop Search wasn't working properly -- in ways to diverse and complex to document here.

I found that Microsoft has two somewhat different products they call "Windows Desktop Search". If you Google on WDS you will find the product they aim at the corporate sector. Don't get that version (so called "3.1").

I ended up uninstalling WDS-Corporate-individual user 3.1 I installed the version you get with Windows Live toolbar..

1. Install Windows Live Toolbar
2. This should install the right version of WDS. If not use "toolbar options" and "install buttons" to find and download WDS...

The version number of the "good" WDS looks like an IP address ...

Update 10/23/07: The saga continued with some improvements as noted above, but then the flakiness returned. In particular Outlook would exit with a hung process, and I'd lose network access. My employer has larded up my system with various inventory services, but, mercifully, does let me disable services. I kept working through the list, disabling various XP services but with little impact. I reviewed my list installed software, and uninstalled various apps I don't use. That' when I noticed a very suspicious Yahoo updater (don't you hate that every damned app has its own update infrastructure?) -- removing that did seem to help my startup time!

The error frequency grew, and it became apparent there was a hardware component to the debacle -- one that wasn't showing up in XP's event logs.

I hate hardware failures -- especially those the OS can't detect.

I replaced the hard drive on the general principle that drive failures are common. If that doesn't work it's time to test memory and even the video memory.