Category Archives: Business

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

SSD Question

15 Comments

Patricia’s Windows machine is almost out of disk, because I have the OS installed on a 120G SSD. I have a spare 240, but it’s been used for another OS. Do I need to wipe the bigger drive first to use it, or can I just DD the contents of the smaller one to the bigger one, and it will all be available?

[Update a while later]

OK, from what I can tell, since I’m not trying to wipe the drive, just make it all available to Windows, it looks like the way to go would be to get anything off it I want (probably nothing), format it in Windows, then dd the old drive to new?

[Update a while later]

OK, I formatted the drive in Windows, in a single NTFS volume that filled it. I copied the old OS to the newly formatted drive. It boots fine, but it only shows as 120G drive. When I use Windows disk tools to look at it, it shows half of the volume as unallocated. But it won’t let me expand it, because it’s the system disk. When I boot from the other drive to try to expand it, it simply shows it as a 240G drive. How am I supposed to recover the rest of the drive for use?

[Friday-morning update]

I didn’t update yesterday, but I rebooted with the original drive, then expanded it using the Windows tools. Unfortunately, it now refuses to boot. I get a blue screen with an error that C:\System32\Winload.efi is missing or corrupted. When I look at it, it’s exactly the same as the one on the original drive, so I suspect that it’s misdiagnosing the problem, but don’t know where to go from here. I ran chkdsk on it, but to no avail, keep getting same error message.

[Saturday-morning update]

OK, I tried again, except this time, I used the software that Lifehacker recommended. It cloned the drive, and it booted just fine. But as with dd, it cloned it so well that it made half the disk unavailable. And as before, when I used Windows disk management to expand the partition, it breaks it in such a way that it not only won’t boot, but Windows installation disk can’t fix it.

Next I’m going to try cloning only the front partitions, and then format the rest of the disk in NTFS, and copy the files from command line.

Business, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

This Morning’s Pad Incident

42 Comments

It seems to be news, so most of you probably heard that there was an explosion on the pad at LC-40 this morning, leading up to a static test fire for the upcoming launch of the AMOS satellite.

What we know so far: No one was injured, but the bird (a $200M payload) was lost. It’s a setback for Spacecom, which was about to be purchased by China pending a successful deployment. It happened prior to ignition, and SpaceX is calling it a “pad anomaly,” so it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rocket itself. But it will be a setback in SpaceX’s aggressive fall schedule until they determine the cause and how to prevent it in the future, and repair the pad.

It’s worth noting that they won’t be launching crew from that pad, but from 39B. But Phil McAlister and Kathy Lueders will want to know if the abort system would have saved crew had they been on top of the rocket. The immediate interesting question to me is whether or not they had any warning. The rocket itself has failure onset detection systems to trigger an abort, but it’s unclear if the pad itself does, and how much warning they would have had to pull the D-ring on the Dracos. Phil and Kathy had also better brace for a very stupid Congressional hearing, and we can all expect to hear a lot of illogical nonsense about how SpaceX should forget about Mars, and how this proves that reusable rockets don’t work.

[Update a couple minutes later]

One point as follow up to that last graf: SpaceX had been requesting to fuel with crew aboard, and NASA had been considering it. That’s probably out the window now.

[Update a couple more minutes later]

There were nine more flights scheduled this year. That was always unlikely, but it’s certainly not going to happen now.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, this is timely. The OIG has released a status report on commercial crew certification.

[Update a couple minutes later]

How this will affect Spacecom. Shares are down with the news. I’d call it a buying opportunity.

[Update a couple more minutes later]

Also worth noting that it’s been a bad couple days for launch. Long March had a failure yesterday, and the Chinese have been mum about it (as usual).

[Update a few minutes later]

Jeff Foust already has a story about the potential ripple effects for SpaceX, SES, and the rest of the affected industry.

[Update a few minutes later]

And here‘s Loren Grush’s story.

[Update a couple minutes later]

And from Miri Kramer.

[Update a while later]

[Update a few minutes later]

Joe Pappalardo probably has the best take at this point.

[Update a while later]

Well, this is bad news.

[Update a while later]

Aaaaaand here’s the video. I’ve heard that people felt it in Orlando. It may have been the largest explosion at the Cape in history.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is great news, if true.