Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Busy Life

After a couple days recuperating from a headstorm which ended Thursday, April 24th, (mind you I'm having to use a calendar to even construct this sentence) it appears I am back in saddle and getting personal life projects accomplished.

A couple glitches surfaced, delaying NASAV Studios™ construction again. Shall blog on this under separate cover.

I am currently making 4 new PC Help Videos. I am not impressed with Camtasia 5. Although some of its new features are nice, editing and doing post production in the time line has UNACCEPTABLE LAG TIME which seriously hampers production. Some users might view this as a "upgrade your PC hardware" sort of thing. I don't think of it that way. I am using a 800 FSB, Pentium 4 3.2GHz, optimized XP SP2, and the performance degredation from Camtasia versions 4 through version 5 are simply unacceptable. There is no point having the ability to adjust and slide things on the time line in any editor having to do with video and sound, if you cannot precisely preview your content exactly how it will be rendered. So, I am back to using Camtasia 3.01 which is easy to use and you can actually edit smoothly in real time and have an accurate preview prior to rendering your final production.

Meanwhile, 11 hours into PC Help Video production, my operating system decides to take a dump. Will not boot to safe mode, reboot loop. Taking video with my little DV cam I was able to see the flashing BSOD (blue screen) which contained no stop error and was a generic, "remove or reinstall bad hardware" error message. Attempting an XP Repair, Windows found 5 partitions. Drive 0, the 80GB HDD which went bad, showed up with 76GB of free space meaning Windows XP is reporting the drive to be empty. Booting up using my custom UNIX boot CD, the partition is found and I can view ALL of the data and their filenames on the drive using short and long-filename modes.

At this point I have 3 options. 1)Killdisk the drive, and install XP; this would be my last choice. 2)Boot @Active File Recovery Enterprise (AFRE), recover data and save to CD/DVD, LAN or external USB (which I don't have an external USB now) and 3)Boot System Commander 9 and disable the "active" partition on that bad 80GB drive. Then connect the bad drive to the PC I'm using now which boots from a 200GB SATA drive, run AFRE, recover data from the bad 80GB drive and save to the 190GB of free space on this 200GB drive. BEST CHOICE. And it worked. Flawlessly.

Initially AFRE found the 80GB IDE HDD partition in "Bad" shape. However, in less than 25% into its thorough scanning process, AFRE upgraded the partition status from Bad to Poor to Not Bad to Acceptable to Good to Excellent! This is wonderful software and totally worth $100 dollars. When logical drive letters get scrambled or when XP cannot boot to safe mode, it's AFRE to the rescue. Note: XPs Recovery Console proved fruitless trying all partition utilities and commands. Actually, the recovery console made things worse, but again, System Commander instantly fixed that!

But before recovering data, first stop was System Commander which I used to disable the active partition on the bad 80GB drive. I won't bother naming them, but just for giggles, I tried 3 name-brand partitioning programs, that people tell me, "they're good partition managers" and yet NONE of the 3 I tried had the ability to change the bad hard drive's, "active" status. In my case, it was paramount to disable the active partition. Without disabling the "active" boot status, the IDE and SATA drives cannot be connected to this motherboard because the BIOS doesn't support toggling to SCSI, which happens to be a workaround for this SATA/IDE drive scenario. So, as long as the IDE partition is active, my SATA C: drive will be ignored and the bad 80GB HDD will continue its boot_looping BSOD_ing nonsense.

If I had an external USB drive to use, I would have simply fired up a AFRE boot CD, recovered the data and saved to the external USB drive. But, I live HOURS from a city where I could purchase a USB drive (today) but I'd rather not pay $30 dollars just to FedEx it overnight. So, I chose to remove the drive from its case, and jack it into this PC. Ran AFRE and recovered the data and saved to the free space on this 200GB drive. Long story, good ending. Data recovered. Problem gone. Thanks again to System Commander and AFRE.

Changing topics, we're going to be changing camp spaces here at the resort. We were offered an incredible offer saving over $3,000 dollars annually. This move will help me to buy a 3GHz iMac 24-inch. The 3GHz dual core provides ample power to run XP/Vista under Apple Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion. I had considered dedicating my P4 2.4GHz XP SP1 PC to use for DAW with my O1X and MOTIF XS, but now I have chosen to bail entirely from Windows and music recording production. The Intel iMAC manages native OS X running Cubase 4 and Tracktion 3 better than its PC counterpart. Even, running XP under Boot Camp, Parallels or VMWare Fusion is better than running native on the Intel P4. So, Harry is headed, "back to MAC-land". I say this because I began my personal computing adventures FIRST on a Mac back in 1984. I find it ironic, now 24 years later, I am returning to Macintosh.

In other news, I am continuing exterior painting of the RV. The mirror struts are finally done and it's time to remove the masking tape. The rear of the RV needs to be cleaned, sanded and taped where it will receive some flat black and crimson red stripe painting to finalize the elimination of this truck looking 24 years old. So, although my plans to construct the NASAV website and post photos and videos of the, "before and after" is now 4 months behind, this project close to completion.

Still enjoying the NDS and during my PC death, it was handy to jump online via wi-fi and twitter and do some email. Go NDS ^5!

For those of you who take your time to read my blog, I would like to thank you for your time and consideration. I trust you will have a nice spring season and I think we're all going to have an exceptional summer this year.

;;cheers;;