Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Space, Technology and Society

West Coast Atlas Launch

There was a launch scheduled out of Vandenberg yesterday at 11:30 AM, and I’d planned to go to the beach to watch, until I remembered my 10:30 dental appointment. So I ended up being in the chair at the time, a little frustrated that I couldn’t at least get up for a couple minutes to go out into the parking lot to see it. But unfortunately for ULA, but fortunately for me, it was scrubbed, due to a hydrogen leak. So I, and others currently in southern California, will get another chance on Sunday morning.

[Sunday-morning update]

Wow, this launch seems snakebit. A wildfire on the base has delayed the launch until at least the 26th.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

California’s “Boom”

11 Comments

Is about to go bust. The notion that CA is doing better than Texas would be hilarious if it weren’t such an infuriating lie.

Reminder: When the state asks for a federal bailout, it should be only on the condition that it become a territory, and not be allowed back in as a single state.

[Update a while later]

I wish that this didn’t seem related: Printing money in Venezuela didn’t work out all that well. Of course, California can’t print money, fortunately.

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.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Computer Problem

26 Comments

I’ve got a weird problem with Patricia’s Windows 8.1 machine. It stopped working while I was in Florida, dying without her being able to restart it. When I got back, I turned off the supply, then back on, and then it booted up (though sometimes it took almost forever). But it kept going to sleep without warning, and couldn’t be woken up without recycling the PS switch. I decided it was probably a bad power supply, the original one from the HP that she had bought, but that I’d kept when I upgraded the motherboard a year and a half ago. I went out and bought a whole new case (the HP case was a PITA to work on), and put in an older 580W supply that I’d had from a previous build. It worked for a day or so, but then started to flake out again in a similar manner. Since it was an old supply, I decided to just go out and buy a new one, a 500W for $40 at Fry’s. But it’s still acting up, so it has to be something other than the supply.

What I don’t understand is how it can not even start up the fans when I hit the front-panel switch. I sometimes have to leave it turned off for a while, which indicates a thermal issue, but just what is the signal to the supply from the MB to turn on? Is there any solution to this other than a new MB?