I had certain problems at the weekend with computer suppliers: most#

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:26:26 +0000

I had certain problems at the weekend with computer suppliers: most notably Simply, who told me on the telephone that thay had lots of cdroms and disks in stock for collection from their London branch, then in person when I got there (admitedly an hour or two later) that they only had 160Gb drives only one kind of cdrom - not the cheap one.

So I mail-ordered instead. Nice new SATA drive arrived today; expected tomorrow, a controller card to use with it. I've already scanned the old disk - on finding that the partition table was unreadable anyway I thought I might as well whack it in a PC and see what I could get - and the good news is that the corruption was entirely confined to the start of the disk (root partition and swap) and didn't affect any of the interesting stuff (cvs repositories, home directories, etc) - once I'd found the start of /export, it restored cleanly onto the new disk. So, with any luck I should have it all running again soon and back on the net next week. Fingers crossed.

Not been writing much here lately (as, obviously, you can tell easily): when I have been doing/thinking about Lisp-related stuff, it's been about a replacement streams system for SBCL. But I barely have anything written down yet, never mind implemented. Oh, and the ALU Wiki is going to die unless someone does something, but I've had no responses of any kind to that message yet, so that shouldn't be a big deal.

Today's neat software: ddrhelp, and ddrescue, on which it depends.