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It was really straight forward to setup side-by-side Windows 7 and Vista on the same computer, simply put them on separate hard-drives (either physical or separate partitions). Installation was no troubles, and I was happily booting between them back and forth as needed, until I hit a snag last night, MAJOR SNAG!!!

I guess Vista didn’t shut down properly or something, so in the next reboot into Windows 7 it detected problems on my Vista hard-drive and decided to “Fix It”. I was not really concerned, since Windows 7 surely knows how to read/fix Vista partition — OR DOES IT!? An unsettling “Replacing invalid security id with default security id for file” messages popped up, and kept going for thousands of files.

Long story short, after it finished, Windows 7 gave me “Access Denied” error when trying to view Vista drive, and even Vista itself couldn’t boot — just goes into black screen. So much for thinking that Win 7 chkdsk was smart enough to not break Vista partition.

Well, here is how I managed to dig myself out of this, and it wasn’t easy! Boot into Windows 7, right click on the Vista drive (E:\ in my case), and choose Security. First, you need to change Ownership to something public, I decided to change it to “Everyone”. Apply that ownership to all sub-dirs/objects also, obviously. Once you take ownership. Click on Security tab and reset that also, again, I did Everyone Full Control and added Guest full control. Not super secure, of course, but that is old partition I am transitioning away from, so I gather it’s good enough. Voila, after that everything is fine. Although, I did notice that if I “push” files from Vista into Win 7 file system, sometimes they come out with “funny” security. It was just one occurrence, but…

Overall I am still loving Win 7, it’s fast and stable, but I guess I should accelerate my transition away from Vista.

Poor attempt at a Not joke? I had a rough day, but I want to promptly document it for everyone’s benefit. Our story begins during late night hours, somewhere deep in the tough Ulduar area in World of Warcraft Instance.

My computer suddenly hung, though mouse was still moving, which is highly unusual! After simple troubleshooting failed to recover it, I proceeded to a full power-cycle. World of Warcraft promptly crashed again, much quicker this time, with CRC error. Concerned, I scheduled a full HD check-disk and surface scan, and left it overnight.

In the morning, I found situation to be same or worse. Software was crashing left and right, seemingly randomly. World of Warcraft’s handy Repair utility, told me my installation was “Too Corrupt to Repair”. I tried many different things, at first focusing on Hard-drive integrity, and kept finding pretty much all data written to disk, coming back with CRC errors.

Long story short, I recalled a handy memtest utility right on the boot menu of Ubuntu. I ran it, and voila, my screen quickly filled with Lots of RED errors, thousands, in fact. I proceeded to remove all memory modules (I had four DDR2), and put them one by one to the test, and as Murphy would have it, the last module was the faulty one. All others passed long battery of tests with flying colors. I reinstalled the three good memory modules, and computer is back to normal, as if nothing was wrong!

Moral of the story? I see several here – For example, why didn’t self-respecting Vista OS (ahem, funny!) include some sanity checks, to alert me to memory failures, instead of crashing with blue screens and failing “Host Processes”? (Yea, I know there is ECC memory, but I am not sure it would have helped in this strange scenario).

But even more so, what about Cloud? I had Mesh and Live Sync going! Something may have Synched into the cloud, with corruption on it! Any Cloud Backup, and pretty much everything else, would cause a disaster! Amazon’s entire S3 cluster went down not too long ago, due to corruption in status data being passed around the cloud.

I’ve been long excited about ZFS technology, and while I am sure it would have alerted me to problems sooner, I am not certain it could have prevented real data corruption in this case. With faulty memory module, everything written from memory to disk, will most likely become “corrupt for life”. Even an attempt to rescue such data will likely not end well, unless hard-drive is moved to another computer for rescue.

It seems that as computer scientists we are missing this very fundamental issue. We can’t trust our latest operating system to alert us if our underlying hardware is misbehaving?! And that our files are becoming corrupt every time we touch them?!

Back to the drawing board!

Having realized that this is a post number 100, I had very hard time to decide what to blog about to make it “special”. So instead, I decided to blog about Nothing (in particular)!

Finished installing new router last night, picked up Linksys WRT360N for cheap at Newegg.com (they’re great!). Was overdue for a new router, still using old G kind, and this is a Gigabit beast, or at least that’s the promise.

Well, thanks to Jason for giving out $5 to existing Mahalo members, and making it fun for us to try out new Mahalo Answers. And Thanks for everyone at Mahalo Answers for writing such positive and constructive feedback for the site. Hope some also subscribed during their visit

WordPress upgrade for this site to 2.7 was Smooth as butter this time! And I hear it is “self-upgrading” from now on – Great Job!

Probably just like everyone else, I’m all excited about Windows 7, and looking forward to grabbing more stable public beta, when it comes (soon!).

On the ever improving iPhone platform, there are some nice new free games (TapDefense, Checkers, PenguinLite), and the $10 worthy SimCity version! Also check out Joost free App and YPMobile

Thinking of adding Google Friend Connect gadget to the site, but I fail to see sufficient value, for all that screen space/page load time I will compromise on… Comments welcome

It’s the end of 2008, and we still can’t get Internet Security or Internet Identity Management right. Seriously, I’d do a startup on this, but I lack the resources. For this to succeed it has to be either really Big guys doing it, or Government mandated kind of deal.

Happy Holidays!

Apologies to all my International blog readers. This is an official Simpsons episode, and I think it only is watchable inside the US right now. I am certain if you do a quick YouTube search, or Veoh, etc, you will find another openly available copy.

So, are you a PC? I am, though I own and enjoy iPhone also. I think for me the price premium is the deal breaker for Mac, plus I do like to tinker and upgrade my computers ALL THE TIME!

Despite the long title, I’ll try to keep this post short. I had two completely opposite experiences with Windows Vista today.

First, I don’t think people realize how handy Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 is. And now that Microsoft made it officially free, there is absolutely no reason not to install it on your Vista!

So here is what I wanted to post, I ran into two distinct aspects with Vista today. On one end, I was able to run 2 Virtual PCs, one running Windows XP SP2, the other running Ubuntu Linux. And in addition, I ran some video playback full screen on the Vista host operating system, PLUS there was CD ripping running at the time, creating some 192 kbps MP3′s from my audio CD! And the two virtual PCs weren’t idle either, Windows XP was converting some of my video files to MP4, for my iPhone. Ubuntu was also running full speed, still installing, in fact.

So, with all that action, all activities were running quickly and without a hitch!

On the flip side, a laptop with Vista Home Basic, gone completely nuts during a simple operation of Logout. Granted, it was a bit overdue for some patches probably. Anyhow, without any special messages, all it said was "Logging Out", and that is it! It sat there on that screen, flashing Hard-Drive a lot, for a long long time. I even gave up, hard-booted it, logged back in (working ok), and then Logged out again. Same thing! Hanging and Hanging and Hanging. After about 20 minutes I gave up and left it running overnight. In the morning, it was fine, logs in fast, logs out fast, weird!!!

So, there you have it! Vista, in all it’s glory! You decide!

PS: For all the people that complained about compatibility of software with Vista, I find Windows XP inside Virtual PC to be perfect compromise. In fact, you can even run Windows 95 or Windows 98, if you so desire, in your Virtual PC. That would help those very old educational games I still have somewhere, but kids outgrew them already anyway…

PPS: I am thinking of going to DragonCon this year for the first time, any suggestions what is a must-see?

UPDATE: I was going to mention a nice Tweaks Guide on Vista, which is more of an overview of Vista annoyances and what to do with them. In retrospect, this post seems like as good time as any, plus Windows Vista blog reminded me about it today…