Saturday, November 19, 2005
Today I donned some yellow rubber gloves and removed the frying pans from their flesh-eating lye bath. First pan came out of the solution, brown stuff came off on the gloves -- that was the old seasoning coming off. I sprayed it down some with the hose and went at it with a scouring pad (not a brillo pad, a proper scouring pad) and got a lot of the old seasoning off.
I repeated this process with the other three pans, being very careful to avoid spashing myself with the nasty lye-water.
I wasn't happy with the level of black stuff left on the pans so I put them back in the bath for a while. I don't know that it will be as effective now that it's cooled off outside. Just seems like the sort of thing that would work better in warm/hot water. Anyway, I'll pull them out in about a week or so and do the same thing. Then they will probably be ready to be seasoned.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Success! Almost everything coppied over uncorrupted, Norton internet security stuff being the only directory affected, apparently, bad enough to be unusuable. I deleted it so it can be reinstalled.
I had sushi tonight, mmmm!
So I've spent the past few days working on my parents computer. They told me Thursday night that it was acting up and from what they told me I figured that it was a hard drive on it's last legs and remembering that I had an extra hard drive in the computer I got from Mike Roderick last year figured I'd just swap out the drives.
Monday: I finally had time to work on the computer and so I brought the drive over to their place (it would be an upgrade, 60 gigs over 20 gigs on their old drive) and started the process. I partitioned it and formatted it and then started copying files over. Realizing it would be easier to use a drive copy utility I decided to get the one that came with Becca's hard drive when I replaced it after a similar incident last year and do it the next day.
Tuesday: After getting off of work and acquiring the utility CD from Becca I came back over and began the process of copying the partitions over. After rebooting it gave me some error about rebooting. I've never seen that error before. After restarting the computer with the old drive I realized that only two of the three partitions I had made on the new drive were showing up. I tried to go into Fdisk to fix the problem and it gave me an error about the drive. Odd, though I. I've never seen this error before, I said to myself.
I checked the status of the drive with the fdisk /status command and this 60gig drive had become a 32gig drive! Well, screw that plan, there's obviously something wrong with this drive too. I do seem to remember Mike having troubles with his computer, this may have been the source of those troubles.
Wednesday: After I get off work I head over to Circuit City. I saw on their website that they have a 100gig Seagate drive on sale for $89 plus $50 in mail-in rebates. Not a bad deal at all since all the other places I found you could get a drive for around $50 were selling 40 gig drives at that price. So I bought it.
Thursday: I'm at their house again. The drive is in and partitioned and the copy utility (Seagate uses the same software as Maxtor, they just put their name all over it, it seems) is running on the first partition of the old drive. As soon as that is done I'll copy the second partition.
I've learned that doing at least two partitions is a great way to ease re-installation of Windows which, inevitably, will need to be done. Keep most of your data and programs on the D: drive and when you have trouble with Windows just format the C: drive and reinstall. You don't have to back-up everything! Also I've heard a lot that it helps to keep Windows' swap file on a separate partition and set it to always be twice the size of your physical RAM. This apparently helps keep fragmentation of the swap file down.
So, hopefully their drive isn't corrupted to the point where I have to reinstall Windows. But if it is, at least most of their data should be intact on the old D: partition. Providing that it hasn't become corrupted as well.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Klasinc&Loncar Duo (Just trying to help it get picked up by Google spiders, I maintain it for them)