Whoopee, this is SUCH fun . . . . NOT.

[unixronin]

I really didn't need this.

We have Medicaid recertification forms to complete.  They require financial information.  That financial information is in Quicken, which is on whitestar, which runs Windows 2000.

About an hour ago, I flashed a BIOS upgrade on whitestar, rebooted, and ... Win2K wouldn't boot.  I've been trying to recover it for the past hour, so far without success.  It appears whitestar's disk (which is less than a year old) has suffered an uncorrectible error at a crucial location to Windows, which didn't show up until I rebooted the machine because until I rebooted, it had no reason to try to read that sector.  So far, I can't even successfully reformat the disk.  It figures this'd happen on the only machine of mine that doesn't run on a mirrored boot disk (and doesn't have the capability to do so).

I have up-to-date backups of all the data, but that doesn't help us right now.  I have backup access to my Quicken files through VMware on babylon5 (and the actual Quicken data files are on babylon5 -- whitestar accesses them over the network, because I trust babylon5 and Linux a lot more than I trust whitestar and Windows 2000), but right now VMware's refusing to run for unknown reasons.  Possibly it didn't like having its binaries stripped.  I'm downloading the latest update as I write this.  Hopefully it'll work.

The drive is a Western Digital Caviar WD600.  According to their web site, it's still under warranty, and they do advance replacement.  I've got an RMA issued, and a new drive should be on the way shortly.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Doesn't gnucash read .qif files? enough to extract your info, anyway?

verdamnt proprietary info formats...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't know, I don't have gnucash installed.  Is it usable yet?
And on yeah, vmware 3.2.1 is a wash.  It barfs the same way 3.2.0 does.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Should be useable enough to get your data out, I should think.

What client are you using? it's barfing superfluous HTML all over your replies...

Superfluous to whom, white man? :)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The HTML is there because I put it there, by hand.  :)  I'm using the regular web interface to followup, and LogJam to post.  What are you using to read LJ that doesn't render the HTML?

(OK, so I'm anal about how my posts and comments are formatted.  I don't think that's a crime, YET, though it might be soon ... it involves the word "anal", after all, which if not pornographic is at least probably Deeply Suspect to the homophobes among the Religious Right.)

....um, say, you have any idea what a thought police siren sounds like?  I've never heard a siren quite li -- Help!  Help!  I'm being oppressed!

Anyway.  In the meantime I'm downloading VMware 4.0 on a 30-day evaluation license.  If that doesn't work, I'll try extraction with gnucash.

Re: Superfluous to whom, white man? :)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Mutt and FastMail (web interface), and I have my LJ replies set to text-only. Some of us still read mail the old-fashioned way, the way God Kernighan, et al. intended.

I do use a buttload of raw HTML when I'm coding an initial post... but I know it's rare at best that someone actually gets their initial posts by email sub. OTOH, just about everybody uses email for the replies... that's where the HTML is minimal.

Re: Superfluous to whom, white man? :)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but email posting is only available to paid accounts . . . which this one ain't, yet.
I've noticed LJ doesn't strip the HTML when it mails you...