Meltdown! Hard Disk Crash saved by Proper Backup Protocol

Ok … pretty slow blogging week. Been meaning to blog New York City, but blogged the garden while waiting to complete day 1 of NYC. And then it happened … my computer made a strange bussing noise that seemed to not want to stop in the middle of the night, so I took the expedient / stupid route and used canned compressed air to clear out the vents etc. Now, had I sprung for the carbon dioxide spray, all would have been well. But no, I cheaped out and bought a can with propellant in it.

So when I started spraying my machine while it was live (and backing up 30GB of music) I managed to spray quite a lot of frozen air onto various parts. And when you do *that*, you fry stuff.

And I fried my images disk … the disk containing all my NYC images and in fact every image I own.

I did not know that at first … the machine would not boot at all the next day, even though it had completed the copy of the music. So I wondered … maybe the motherboard was fried, since it seemed like the machine could not even see the drives sometimes. Well, in the end, the SATA bus was being screwed up by the presence of this broken disk. No doubt I blew a cap on its board or something. I figured that our by replacing it with my new Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black. Now both disks were visible and the machine rebooted just fine.

Whew!

Then, I checked my Seagate Freeagent 1TB USB backup drive to see what I might have lost from the last week and only the neighborhood and some baby geese from that day were missing. NYC was there, although all my processing had been lost.

Well … whew again!

Now … that left me wondering … do I burn the new fast drive as an image disk? Or do I take some pain now and replace my Caviar Green drive with the Caviar Black? I have wanted to do that for a while, hence the purchase of DriveImage XML by Runtime Software a few weeks ago, so I went for it. I ran the direct diskcopy overnight and it seemed to work fine. So I disconnected the original drive and tried rebooting. No go.

I farted around with Windows 7 repair facility, which you get to from the install panel after booting into the DVD. Well, Windows 7 knows that I have no master boot record, but it does not quite seem able to find the problem with the missing boot files. Well, duh. So reboot after reboot (it can take 3 times) did nothing for me. So I looked on the Internet and found the perfect instructions for this task. There are several similar posts out there for Vista and Windows 7, so thanks to all who came before me on this.

Three steps worked for me after I copied my C: Windows 7 drive to my new partition.

1. Make sure the new partition is the first that Windows encounters on boot. I plugged the new disk into port 0 on the SATA bus, so that was taken care of. I happened to also have it as the only drive, so it would have worked anyway … but just in case you are adding a drive and not just replacing.
   
2. Make the new parition active. When you go into Windows 7 repair from the setup screen, it has numerous options, the last of which is command line. Go there and type these commands …
   
   > diskpart
   DISKPART> list disk
   disks shown here
   DISKPART> select disk 0 (or whatever number matches the new boot drive)
   DISKPART> list partition
   partitions shown here
   DISKPART> select partition 1 (or whatever partition is your copied installation of Windows 7)
   DISKPART> activate
   DISKPART> exit
   >
   
   You could of course verify that your new parition is showing as C: before launching into diskpart …
   
3. Now you need to copy the WIndows 7 boot files to this partition. That’s a piece of cake. At the same command prompt, type:
   
   > bcdboot
   
   … and follow the instructions.

This worked fine for me. The next reboot behaved exactly as expected.

However, as there are a near infinite set of possible conditions, issues, hardware and configurations, I make no warranty that this will work for you, either expressed or implied. Further, you perform these tasks at your own risk. I take no responsibility for you, your computer, your data, or anything else that you might destry while performing such tasks.

And I am now copying my entire image library over to my second new Caviar Black 1TB … this takes 5 hours for 197GB … and the only reason that I am not sick about all this is that I followed my own advice and backed up the NYC images *immediately* after downloading them to the main disk. So all 1500 images were on that backup. I will, in half an hour, have two copies of everything, and a third copy of much of my work on Carbonite.

Edit: I found a link to one of the original discussions I liked the best. Pretty much what I followed.

D700 – Neighborhood Flowers

Took a half hour walk at lunch today and it was a bit overcast, so I thought I’d see what was growing in the neighborhood. I didn’t want to go too far onto yards, so this is a smallish selection.

I took the D700 with Tamron 28-75 since I really enjoyed that combo in NYC. The results were alright.

I started on my own yard because I noticed a butterfly in among my Ostrich Ferns. Here, he tries to run away …

He eventually lands and remains stable for a moment on a fern leaf. I am fairly close and I lean in, snapping as I go. These are all crops, of course, since I did not bring the 70-300VR along. Regrets … I’ve had a few … oops, NYC will be posted later on :-)

This is a nice time of year for my front garden. The ferns are very lush.

Some nice Peonys growing in a neighbor’s yard.

Across the street from there is the Bridal Veil Spirea that I’ve wanted to shoot all spring. But I waited too long … still, I shot it for posterity. No longer full bloom, but you can probably imagine what this thing looks like covered in tons of fresh white blooms.

Flowering bushes are always good for a closeup or two …

Some way down the street is a gorgeous Clematis. Since I don;t like walking deep onto yards, and since I was sporting a 70mm lens on a FF sensor, this is a heavy crop :-)

A few doors down is a native Rose bush … looks a little different from my Hansa Rose … there are so many varieties.

And finally, two of my neighbors are into the growing of Poppies. This is from the better of the two crops.

A nice walk and I can’t say enough about the D700. A real joy to use. 

Banned Again from DPReview?

Yes :-)

I was getting along just fine on DPReview until yesterday, when lloydy and painterdude and one other inconsequential person orchestrated a concerted attack on me. I kept my responses as neutral as possible while still being pointed, but alas … you don’t mess with the attack pack. They love that complaint button …


Interestingly, I pressed the complaint button a couple of times myself yesterday … maybe that’s why I got nailed. Only the attack pack is allowed to use that device :-)

VelventAnt received just such a notice a week or two ago and then received a permanent ban a day or two later. I would not be surprised to see the same thing here. And frankly … it might be for the best. DPReview forums seem to be devolving into a bit of a gong show these days … certainly the Fuji Talk Forum, where bullshit passes as information, lies are used to insult and one-liner dismissals like “talk to the hand” hand pass as considered debate. (I’m not kidding about that last one … painterdude busted that out just yesterday :-)
*sigh* … been there and done that.

Forgot to mention this touch ... yesterday, mr. talk to the hand called for a permanent ban for me, although I had done nothing but defend myself. And I predicted in bold that he had just subtly put out the call for a coordinated complaint button attack. That post is deleted now and so am I. I think I might have them sussed :-)

Update: The parade of idiots and fan boys (this is a loooonnnnnggggggg parade) has finally driven one of the top contributors (quality, not quantity) away. Ted (a.k.a. tdkd13) has announced his retirement from the forum. Wow … the place is turning into a desert …

Updates: Ted is back, but *very* subdued. Velvet Any melted down completely later on and when she came back she attacked all her old friends and switched sides. It was embarrassing to watch the pandering, and that still continues. Sad.

F80EXR and D700 do New York City

Got back last night from a bus tour to NYC with Karen (who led the tour.) A lot of fun, but quite tiring. I will start posting images from the F80EXR (almost 500 shot) and the D700 (almost 1000 shot) in a day or two. The D700 with Tamron 28-75 2.8 and 70-300VR was a remarkable combination. The F80EXR was extremely handy. Great trip.

D700 – Garden Update for mid-May

Well, it’s time to start updating the progress of the garden. The front garden was quite active during tulip time, but that is over. A few stragglers left, none worth imaging. The Bleeding Hearts are in full bloom, and much bigger than I expected. Very pleased with that. And the massive (12ft x 12ft) Lilac bush I have is losing flowerets now …

I took the Nikon 85mm 1.8 and the Sigma 105mm 2.8 Macro outside for a bit of fun for 10 minutes or so, and found quickly that the 1.8 does not focus close enough to be useful in the garden. I had thought so, but this confirmed it. I may try again at some point with my 77mm Canon 500D attached.

Meanwhile, the 105 had my smaller (67mm I think) 500D attached, and I mostly shot with it on. Hand held, this presents a major challenge, but this was supposed to be a quick shoot, so I stuck with it for fun. The lens focuses to 1:1, which is about a foot away, and at that magnification, you can’t expect sharp results without very high shutter speeds. To get that, I cranked my ISO to 3200 after starting at 160. 3200 is high enough that even the D700 will struggle with to retain fine details in dark areas. But this is an experiment, so I pushed on.

Here’s the one image I got with the 85mm 1.8 … this is a heavy crop because I could not get very close.

I quickly switched lenses and now I have the ability to shoot at magnifications greater than 1:1 … assuming that the gusty breeze would settle and I could hand hold well enough :-)

The first this you note is the unbelievable bokeh at 2.8 … but shutter speeds are slow at 160 ISO …

  This one was not tack sharp, but is still appealing. Note that the flowerets look sharp because the rest is so diffused … remember that trick.

Same thing with this one … very soft flowerets, but it’s all relative.

A huge Bumble Bee flew in and landed on some flowers above me. I shot a dozen images with the 500D in place, which meant I had to stretch to get close enough. These crops are fairly aggressive, and the noise is pretty dramatic, as these were underexposed. I did what I could to clean the bee shots up, because the detail in their fur is pretty nice.

 

I like this bee shot the best, as he was buzzing at the time.

Finally, I walked over to the bleeding hearts. The wind made it essentially impossible to grab clear images … this is the best I could do.

Looking back towards the Lilac Bush from the porch, I could catch the top half of the bush with a neighbor’s tree in the background. Shooting at 2.8 blurred the tree out nicely. One thing about shooting with primes. They are sharp :-)

D700 – Nick’s Tattoo

The other night, Nick came home fairly late to show me his new tattoo … a skateboard-centric theme on the inside of his left bicep.

I shot these in a room with rather horrid halogen light and in a bathroom with compact fluorescents … the color correction was nasty enough under the halogens that I went with black and white.

I must say that, after using the D300 for the last two or three shoots, the D700 remains incredible in the hands. What a camera …

Nikon D700, 85mm f/1.8D
f/1.8  1/500s,  3200ISO, –1/3EV

Nikon D700, 85mm f/1.8D
f/1.8  1/2000s,  3200ISO, –1/3EV

I kind of like the tat …