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November 20 Why don't some people "get it" ?So, okay, I mentioned before that this past weekend the FIRST Robotics team that I run had an outstanding FIRST LEGO League tournament at our school. It was everything you could ever hope for: the veteran members and adults helped lead the newer members through everything that needed doing, the teams of middle schoolers and their families had a good time, the events ran on schedule, and the results turned out pretty much good enough that no one could complain about anything. We've heard from numerous guests that, once again, our team did a great job.
And then there was the "inside story": One FLL Team (Team A) had some issues with a parent who was getting, shall we say, a tad too enthusiastic about getting the kids to follow his way of doing things. Under the guise of "look what my son did over the weekend", he tried to strong-arm the rest of the seventh graders into abandoning their efforts and adopt the LEGO bot that he (and his son) built at home. Recognizing that this would defeat the entire "team" approach, the team's coach (and the rest of the kids) balked at the prospect of his approach. Upset with the rejection, this guy found another local team (Team B) five weeks into the eight week season, joined, and convinced them that they needed to abandon their ideas and go with this new fangled approach.
At our competition, the Technical Judges were easily able to see that the Team B didn't really understand how their robot worked (i.e., they didn't build it). However, since the kids performed well in the Research Presentation part of the competition, they won a ticket to the State competition next month. Word on the street is that this guy took the robot home after the tournament was over, and has been spending lots of quality time with it (and his son) rebuilding / reprogramming it so that it will perform better at States. Aside from the fact that this violates the spirit (if not the letter) of the FLL regulations, doesn't this guy realize what he's doing to the rest of the team?
Sometimes I take a lot of criticism about how I run my FIRST team, but there's not a single student who ever feels that the mentors have more of a say than they do. November 15 Murphy aside, another good dayToday, Team 811 pulled off yet another outstanding FLL tournament. This was our sixth year of running Cardinal Chaos (as we call it), where we open the BG gymnasium up for a dozen or so middle- and junior high-school FIRST LEGO League teams and host a local competition for them. This one was really special for me, because I had almost nothing to do with it during the day. You see, I got suckered into being the head coach for the Nashua Catholic Regional Jr. High FLL team. (Actually, FLL teams, but that's a story for another entry.) Anyway, since my FLL team was attending Cardinal Chaos, it wouldn't have really seemed appropriate if I was running the event as well. So, after getting everything set up and organized, Thursday I turned to the team and announced that they were essentially on their own. ("If you need something that only a school representative can handle, call me. Otherwise, if anyone needs anything, find another mentor.”) The Team 811 kids and mentors were fabulous, taking care of everything that our guests needed. Everyone I spoke to told how we made the day fun and stress free (as we usually do), and no one had anything negative to say.
And, yes, I did have to do the “school rep” thing: The BG football team was in present briefly as they prepared to head out for the semi-final game (which we won again, Go BG!), and a player’s mom found me and begged me to open the gym locker room, so that she could retrieve the book bag that her son left locked in there. (They’re going away after the game, and he wouldn’t have been able to do homework.) Sounds to me that he didn’t really forget it, but that’s just my opinion.
But anyway, if Cardinal Chaos was so successful, why did I mention Murphy in the title? At 8:00am, with less than an hour before Opening Ceremonies, guess who realized that the NashCath team left their robot IN NashCath? (Several frantic phone calls, and I found a helpful person who had the keys and would open the school for me.)
November 14 And in other news ...Tomorrow morning, at the BG Gymnasium, (FIRST Robotics) Team 811 will be hosting the 6th annual Cardinal Chaos FIRST LEGO League competition. A bunch of local middle- and junior high schools will be bringing their LEGO-based robots to our school to see how well they do in this year's challenge: Climate Connections. There are about 18 "missions" on the playing field (a 4' x 8' plywood sheet boardered by 2x4 walls), and the teams have 2-1/2 minutes to complete as many of them as they can. Points are awarded for each mission completed, and deducted for each penalty (for example, each time the robot fails to return to base and has to be manually retrieved).
The 6th-8th graders have been working on their creations since mid-September, so Saturday's competition is the culmination of their efforts. I'll see if I can get some pictures posted. November 06 Almost, but not quite?This morning, after assuring myself that I had in fact gotten all of the critical data off of the newly recovered hard drive from my laptop, I got bold, and put the drive back into the laptop. Lo and behold, it booted! I was ecstatic, and proceded to (among other things) restore the desktop computer I was using back to student use. Unfortunately, by lunchtime I encountered another BSD; furthermore, by mid-afternoon it suffered yet another hard crash, and the laptop is no longer bootable.
 My wife suspects virus; she may be right, but I think it's more likely that I have a broken OS mix. While I'm ecstatic with the fact I brought the drive back from the dead, I am still a little disappointed it's not completely healed. The next chance I get (this weekend, or early next week) I will do my MBR/PBS editing again, hopefully getting the system up and running again. THEN I'll have my MIS guy refresh the NT system, and THEN I'll do a virus scan. Hopefully that will keep it from spontaneously dying. November 05 Data RECOVERYTwo and a half years ago I wrote about recovering data from corrupted hard drives (here, here, and here). Two weeks ago I wrote about having to move my hard drive from one laptop to another, because my old one was suffering from some kind of motherboard failures. Well, while the computer "worked" well enough, it obviously had an issue or two (probably due to subtle system or driver changes due to the dying motherboard), because once in a blue moon it would suffer a BSD (blue screen of death) when I was doing something fairly innocuous. But, since a brand new computer was coming RSN ("real soon now"), I figured I would keep my MIS guy off my back by coaxing the laptop along until then. You have figured I'd learn by now ...
Late last week, right after a BSD incident, the laptop complained upon rebooting that it had determined that the failure was because I needed to install the latest service pack for Visual Studio .NET, and all would be well. Okay, I tell it, I'm game, go ahead. It proceded to take an hour or so to download the 417MB of data (wow, that's big). Unfortunately, somewhere in the middle of the installation (I wasn't there at the time), another BSD occured. This time, it wouldn't wake up again. When I rebooted it, I'd get the manufacturers splash screen, and then ... nothing. Not the standard black screen w/ white status bar and then the XP Loading picture, just nothing. Okay, sweat starting to bead on the forehead, let's hit the old F8 key. Nothing. No hard drive activity, just plain dead.
I try the "move the hard drive to another computer" trick that worked so well before. Nothing. So I go to my MIS guy, and he presses the magic keys, and the system tries to boot from the network (VERY neat trick!). Okay, so the system is fine. He starts a network backup of the hard drive (since there is VERY important, and naturally not-backed up data on the drive), and he can read everything. Unfortunately, it's a binary image copy, which means that if doesn't have another drive of EXACTLY the same topology, the copy is meaningless. But it does mean that the drive isn't completely dead.
So, I borrow a USB drive caddy, with the SATA-ATA adapter, and I try reading the hard drive from another desktop. I plug in the USB cable, and see a message on the screen "The drive is not formatted. Do you wish to format it?" NOOOO!!!! This drive is telling me that it's got serious issues, with either the partition table or the partition boot record. (Yes, from a past life I know about both; I used to live there.) But I don't want to take a hack at it (literally) until my MIS guy has one more shot at it.
He tries a couple of more obscure recovery tools he's got, and late yesterday tells me that there's nothing he can do, it's all up to me. I happen to have a couple of periods free this morning, so I take the drive back. I also take another identical drive (the original drive from the laptop I hijacked two weeks ago) to serve as the valid data point. (For clarity's sake, let's call my original laptop and drive the A units, and the borrowed laptop and its drive the B units.) Armed with hard drive A, hard drive B, the SATA-ATA adapter, and a bootable floppy (with some of my magical tools from a dozen years ago), I opened up a desktop computer.
I put hard drive B into the desktop, booted the floppy, and used a home brew disk editor to look at the individual sectors. I see the Master Boot Record (MBR) with a valid partition table (which I dutifully copy down), pointing to a valid partition, whose partition boot sector (PBS) looks healthy. Good to know. There's lots of empty space between the MBR and PBS; this is expected. I'm a little disconcerted that live file data follows the PBS; I would have expected the equivalent of the FAT, but I know that NTFS doesn't have to have the FAT equivalent in any particular location, so I'm okay with this.
Then I put hard drive A into the desktop. MBR with a partition table identical to the other (expected), some blank space ... wait a moment, there's data here! The first track is not all empty! And there's no PBS at the start of the partition! Whatever overwrote this continued on, because the data that starts mid first track continues on beyond where the live stuff was. Okay, this is not good, but the explanation is here: SOMETHING corrupted the start of the drive!
Okay, take a breath, time to think. I reload hard drive B, and using another obscure and ancient tool of mine, I copy a bunch of the sectors from the "good drive" (including the PBS and the live data that followed) directly to the floppy. Reload hard drive A, and ... no, don't paste it down yet. First preserve the same sectors onto the floppy, in case this doesn't work. Okay, NOW copy the saved sectors from the good drive onto the same location on the bad drive. Done.
Now ... no, I still can't read the drive. I don't have a bootable floppy disk that can read an NTFS partition. Hmmm, okay, put the drive back into the USB caddy. Plug it into a booted system, and YES! IT SEES ALL THE DATA!
Immediately I start a large scale transfer of all the critical data onto a network drive. All is almost right with the world, I have the stuff I need for school again.
But now that this crisis is over, I have to wonder ... can this drive boot in my laptop again? Stay tuned ... |
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