On Saturday when I started my XP PC the wallpaper was displayed but then startup seemed to stall for a minute before the desktop icons were displayed. I decided to conveniently ignore it.

On Sunday when starting up the same PC the same thing happened and I also noticed a knocking sound coming from the hard drive. Eventually it did boot OK. Obviously Windows was having trouble reading from the hard drive which sooner or later would probably turn out to be terminal. Time to panic a bit.

Downloaded Spinrite v6 on the Vista PC, which was delivered as an ISO file, which I wrote to a CD as a bootable disk. Put the CD in the XP PC and rebooted. Didn’t reboot from the CD. Spent 10 minutes trying to find out what the key sequence was to access the bios. Set the bios to try and boot from the CD before the C: drive and rebooted. Still booted from the C: drive. Went back into the bios and told it to only boot from the CD drive and totally ignore the C: or D: drive and rebooted. Still booted from the C: drive.

Created a bootable floppy with the Spinrite software and rebooted with that. Success. Spinrite displays a screen of hard drive information where you decide which drive you want it to work on. Selected the problematic C: drive and told it to run using option 4 which does some kind of heavy testing and marks dodgy sectors bad and then writes the data to another good sector. I think option 2 was for data recovery when sectors had already been marked as bad and the data couldn’t be accessed. Option 4 is still running and is estimated to take about 12 hours.

When it has finished running the drive should be OK with no loss of data. The next reboot should be interesting.

Quote of the day

‘Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one’ A. J. Leibling (1904-1963)

The Vista laptop got itself a bit confused today.

At one point it rebooted itself and then decided that there was something wrong with the hard drive as it invoked chkdsk. Chkdsk found several problems with some windows DLL files and decided to delete them, hopefully they were reinstalled later. When it had finished that it started OK, except that the the Windows Dreamscene Content I used for wallpaper had been replaced with a plain black wallpaper. Vista did pop up a window saying there was a problem with it.

Later on I tried to amend the wallpaper back to the Dreamscene bees and flowers moving image. As soon as I had selected it Vista rebooted itself again. It tried running chkdsk again which I aborted. It carried on loading with plain wallpaper OK. I amended the wallpaper back to the Dreamscene bees and flowers and this time it installed OK.

Vista then helpfully popped up a window saying that it had recovered from an error and would I like to let it search on-line for a solution (or excuse). I agreed, and off it went and started up IE7 and loaded my usual pages. It never did find the solution or excuse, just sort of difted off and forgot about it.

Vista SP1 is apparently due in October or November. Perfect timing for Christmas, a version of Vista that works. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, has said that he knows nothing about any SP1.

Quote of the day

‘The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously’ Henry Kissinger (1923-)

The software I was testing and had just about managed to proved worked OK was tested in a kind of development type environment. This is not an ideal situation but it had to suffice. The developers weren’t able to amend the system without certain controls so it wasn’t total chaos.

I have now moved over to a more structured configured test environment. The build of this environment has taken months and was performed by somebody that I think was a bit out of his depth. Anyway I have tried to run some software on this environment and it has failed miserably at the starting post. Both of the main applications failed. I took a load of screen dumps of all of the ghastly error messages and spoke to both the developer and a system guy and both confirmed that the environment was not setup correctly. One of the other testers has said that it is because the build has been correctly configured. What that means I do not know. When I said that I had proved the software worked correctly in the pseudo development environment he said that that was because we had had all kinds of tweaks applied to make it work and that the reason the software didn’t work in the correctly configured test environment was because we didn’t have those tweaks. Give me strength.

As far as I’m concerned they should go get those tweaks and do whatever is necessary to make this system work. This is the only reason we are here, to do whatever is necessary to get the working version delivered to the users. Seems that some people are trying to make a point that when the system is configured as per some documentation that in actual fact it doesn’t work. Terrific. What on earth is the point in coming to this conclusion apart from proving some point. OK, point proved, update the documentation and build the test environment again.

Our build guy should be talking to both the developers and the regular systems guys to find out every little thing he needs to know to enable him to build the system correctly. Then we can do our job and get the software tested.