There’s something intensely alluring about tech like the Drobo. I am reminded of a time when solving a problem permanently was a primary goal. A time when devices had clear purposes and switches had a satisfying click to them. The Drobo has both a satisfying power switch and also some auto-on creative capabilities. The proprietary BeyondRAID filesystem scheme which cleverly…
PC ER
PC Emergency Room
It’s worse than I thought. The new ASUS U47A comes with a whole host of “security” features to prevent downgrading of the operating system, Windows 8. This particular U47A system was purchased in preparation for a federal criminal trial in Las Vegas in which I will be relying heavily on the system to serve up dense amounts of information. I…
Imagine you’re trying to merge two partitions together using a utility like GParted from a live CD and everything is humming along nicely until the power gets cut. Once the power permanently interrupted the merge, Windows would no longer boot, and all of the important data on the drive was inaccessible. At the time I was performing this recovery, I…
Symptoms: System attempts to load the Windows XP operating system, cuts to black and very quickly flashes a blue screen full of text and reboots in an endless loop. Due to the brief stint of the blue screen, no specific identifiable error messages are retrievable. Hypothesis: The system is attempting to display a “stop” error message, commonly referred to as…
Situation: 2GB SD card no longer registers as ‘visible’ to the digital camera and is barely readable within the Vista OS. Potential Loss: ~1.5GB worth of photos and videos of Hong Kong.
This is one of the worst kind of error messages you can receive. Typically, however, one can conclude that either the hard drive is not functioning properly, the BIOS cannot detect the hard drive — or — if you’re really lucky, it’s a simple, dumb mistake like leaving a USB flash drive in the computer and the BIOS is attempting…