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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.

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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!

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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!

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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!

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Today we watched opening ceremony in HD on our big screen. A day late, but I prefer to watch things on my own schedule, even sporting events! The ceremony was Inspiring, especially in all the High Definition glory on the wall.

You will need specific setup, to bring the best quality available Olympic coverage to your Big Screen TV. First thing you’ll need is Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate edition. Next, you will need an XBox 360 connected to home network, or you can skip this in case your Windows Vista PC is already hooked up directly to TV (it happens!).

Now, simply install TVTonic add-on on your Windows Vista MediaCenter PC, and start it. You can use it on your Windows Vista PC or naturally view it via XBox 360, using the Media Center extender functionality.

Actually, TVTonic brings a whole world of Internet TV to your local computer. It is actually similar to Miro and others, in that it simply pulls RSS feeds of Podcast style broadcast shows. It comes with pretty impressive guide with all kinds of Internet shows, including Dilbert, and GameTrailers in HD, both of which me and the kids enjoy tremendously!

Of course, you can always simply visit NBC Olympics site and watch highlights or even full events, steaming and online.

I am very pleased with this progress! The TVTonic client is completely free and brings home very high quality video, for convenient viewing on the Big-Screen TV. We have configured it to download specific sports, like soccer and fencing, automatically as they become available!

If you have Vista 64 Bit edition (very rare still), they are promising to make it available soon (via EngadgetHD).

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