So I was trying to do some work the other morning in my hotel room and my Windows 7 computer gave me the dreaded blue screen of death and would not boot past loading a certain library file. I was able to boot into an Ubuntu disk that I happened to have and found that there were many S.M.A.R.T. errors on the disk and wished I had thought to monitor this. So it seemed that my drive was cooked and I could not get any of the data from it.

    I was disappointed that Spinrite was unable to save me from the problems that I was having and I paid 90 bucks for it. So I turned to tools in Linux that might do the job. I had used the dd utility to copy the contents of my drive to a new drive in the past, but dd will exit on the first error. So I found that there is an addition to the dd program called ddrescue which is part of the GNU Project.

This utility will let you copy the contents of a disk or partition and allow you to skip the errors or even retry the error spots a number of times.

The command line is something like:

    ddrescue -r 3 /dev/sda1 /media/newvolume/diskimage.iso /media/newvolume/logfilefordiskimage

The really nice thing is if you have to stop the command for some reason, it will restart from the end of the log file. It does take quite a bit of time. I am 6 1/2 hours into recovering a 500GB disk, but it beats losing all my data. I will follow up this post with the results of the rescue and the next steps I took to recover the data.

Part 2 of article

Tags: dd, ddrescue, Linux

So I finally moved away from the iPhone(as it turned horrible when I used the “supported” update to iOs 4 on my 3g) and have gotten myself a Droid X. This phone has been awesome(and I have only had it for 2 days).

The Google driving directions app that comes with the phone has been awesome and the unified mailbox is pretty cool. The Android market has been nice and I have perused quite a few apps so far and have been very excited as to what is out there. I was a little afraid as I had heard some less then great things but am very happy to be misinformed.

I am still on the hunt for a good messaging app that supports popup messages (like the iPhone had) and also looking for a new expense receipt tracking app.

I will be following up with some useful information about using the Android OS as I have access to two of them in the house.

I am excited to have this new toy and looking forward to the things I can do with it.

Tags: android, droid, droidx, review

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T410 running Windows 7 64-bit and the touchpad stops working after about 10 minutes or so and required a reboot and removal of devices to get it to work again.

I found that if you remove the Lenovo version of the drivers and go to the Synaptics website to download them, then you can have the full functionality of the touchpad back.

Synaptics Driver Download site

Tags: fix, Hardware

Motorola DCT6412 (Comcast DVR) 30-second skip

I have a Tivo and missed the 30 second skip that was available and I found that the same was available with the Comcast Cable remote.

1) Press the button at the top of the remote to put it into Cable Box control mode.

2) Press and hold the button until the button blinks twice.

3) Type in the code 994. The button will blink twice.

4) Press (do not hold) the button

5) Type in the code 00173 (for 30 second Skip).

6) Press whatever button you want to map the skip, I used the help button as I have never used it myself.

Welcome to 30 second skipping.