I was starting to get worried about my iTunes backup drive and what would happen if that went west. My iTunes library is about 250gb in size and as my iPod has a 160gb drive and only about 60gb was being used I thought it would make some sense to fill it up and then I would at least have a partial 3rd backup of the iTunes library.

Of course dealing with these huge amounts of data puts a strain on systems left right and center. I did a couple of 10gb updates to the iPod with no trouble then checked a lot more iTunes entries which must have totalled about 50gb more music to sync with the iPod. Now that is a lot of files to copy and was going to take some time. I monitored its progress and it was going to take days. Then all of a sudden it finished, far sooner than I had expected. I also saw a message that the PC drive was having problems and to run Scandisk. Which I did and which failed as the drive couldn’t be accessed for various reasons. In fact nothing could access it.

Thought about this for a couple of days and tried a few things with no luck. I even tried Spinright, which I’ve used before and does fix hard drives, but that needs to be booted from it’s own FreeDOS bootable CD or floppy and that doesn’t recognise USB drives, which the Itunesmusic folder was on. The Spinright web page says something about finding hard drive USB drivers for Open DOS O/S’s. Maybe I should have looked at that option but the thought of messing about with config.sys files didn’t actually fill me with optimism. The other option was to somehow interface the USB drive directly onto the motherboard. Couldn’t think how to do that at all. So I returned to a bit of software I have used before which is ‘iPod to Computer Transfer’ and copies files from the iPod to wherever you want and the obvious place was the backup iTunesmusic folder. The small niggly problem here was that the backup hadn’t been sync’d with the iTunesmusic for a couple of months and was therefore out of date with recently added music and films. Everything that I have updated iTunes with though had been sync’d onto the iPod. I was therefore able to use the iPod to update an out of date backup of the iTunesmusic folder.

The version of iPod to Computer software that I use copies over everything, shame it doesn’t check whether the source file already exists on the target folder which would decrease the copy time considerably. Anyway it doesn’t and the copy back process needs to copy just over 15,000 files which I figure is going to take about 36 hours. Now what chance is there that all this copying back from the iPod to the PC process, with the iPod hard drive being read constantly, is going to bust that drive?

Spinrite finished working on the C: drive and the PC then rebooted very quickly, which to me proved that the problem sectors had been fixed.

The Spinrite file is only about 150k in size as its written in Assembler. This makes Spinrite, on a cost per K basis, one of the most expensive bits of software around, but I’m definitely not complaining.

Thought I’d make an edited DVD of the film we took on holiday and thought Windows Move Maker would be OK. Tried to get it to import the VOB files and of course it doesn’t recognise that file format. Did a search for a VOB file converter and found several though most barely worked, or if they did they wanted money for a usable version. Eventually gave up to think again. 

Nearly finished the IT in the East book and these guys didn’t have a lot of good to say about infrastructure in India. Not sure if I should repeat anything written in that book as I’m sure it’s gonna annoy a lot of people.

Quote of the day

‘It isn’t necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy’ Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

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)