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)