[Blog] Ribbet ribbet BANG

Exploding toads baffle experts.

Poor things. And amphibians are in trouble these days as it is...

[Gacked from hobnobs.]

The good...

By about half 5 this afternoon, I was running up a small hill in the spring sunshine, with birdsong faintly audible over the Mesh, Tori Amos and ZZ Top coming out of my MP3 player - which mysteriously came back to life a few weeks ago, after having the winter off due to being apparently dead. Ahead, I could see trees and flowers and rolling grassy slopes; behind me lay a small lake and some wooded wetlands, and I'd run past startled woodpigeons, rooks, jackdaws, magpies and a few rabbits. For as far as I could see in any direction lay nothing but green countryside. When I crested the hill, I stood for a moment, not so much as to catch my breath as to take in the view as the music switched to Losing my religion by REM. Far off I could see some high buildings and a few transmitter masts but apparently nothing much closer.

What's amazing is that I'd run straight from home and I'd only gone 2 or 3 miles. I was down towards the southern edge of Mitcham Common, only half an hour or so from home. I've never explored it before, though I've ridden past it enough times. There's quite a lot crammed into what must be well under than a mile square, from neat open green spaces to bosky woods and delightfully dark and dank wetlands. Last year, I probably wouldn't have been able to get this far on a single run. Today, my legs are still getting stronger, though this is at the limit of my range still - after going round the edge I was in too much pain to continue, mainly from the hips, so I walked back and did some shopping on the way.

A couple of mates (Stef L and James Brophy) have been recently asking me how they can get into this running lark, since it seems to be working for me. I don't really know what to say. Good shoes are essential but that and a personal stereo are all the kit you really need. The first few times are pretty grim, it must be said, but getting hot and sweaty (yes, and achey and tired, briefly) starts to feel good after a while, and being able to get to somewhere so green and pleasant under your own leg power, pounding along under the sun and eating distance in a way no walker can feels so damned good, I wish I'd started doing it years ago. I marvel now looking back at the lengths I went to to avoid going on cross-country runs at school. Given the better asthma drugs available today, I'd love to go back and do them for my teenaged self now...

... The bad...

Got the BMW sidecar outfit back on Friday, after 14 months in for repairs. I've had to buy a whole replacement bike to get a gearbox for mine, and the time has not been kind to it - the chair's windscreen has now totally collapsed and it's looking even more tired and shabby than ever. It was great to be able to go to a new, more distant supermarket and try some new stuff without having to worry about how to get it home, though.

So on Sunday, I decided to take a somewhat reluctant technofairy down to the pub in Croydon. It's silly that normally the poor girl has to drive me around, when I don't drink and she does - but can't. This way is much fairer.

Snag is, it was running really roughly on the way there and on the way back it died altogether. I managed to get it started again, half way back from Croydon, but it died again on the edge of Mitcham - handily close to my local bike shop, so I just coasted up onto their forecourt - and we had to walk back. Nearly a year and a quarter and a £450 bill and it's still not working.

The chap that did the work is going to come and have a look at it later this week - he thinks a replacement petrol tank and new fuel lines will sort it. Also, tomorrow I should get my H100 back, fixed and MOTed after the entertainment of the chain coming off, snapping and locking the back wheel last week - on my way to Croydon once again, as it happened.

And it looks like the aforementioned local dealers have managed to locate another engine for the ZZR. Why do these things always all come along at once? The bank account isn't going to stand this... A couple of them are going to have to go...

... And the ugly

Which is where it all goes a bit geeky.

I am trying to rescue sparktastic's Sony Vaio laptop, which has died. It was running WinXP and its 30GB hard disk, split into 2, is all NTFS. The trouble is, Windows has committed hara kiri as is its wont and lunched its registry.

What's worse is, the machine's internal DVD-ROM is dead. So I can't boot it off a Windows CD to attempt to fix the disk, nor off a Knoppix disk to burn the files onto her external USB2 DVD-rewriter.

What I need to find is some way to boot this thing off an external, USB2 or Firewire drive. After a lot of mucking around, I managed to make a Knoppix boot floppy on another machine. (Knoppix comes with a script to do this, but firstly the script can't write a working LILO config and secondly 2.6 kernels can't boot themselves off floppy any more. Oh, and the 2.6.11 kernel is too big, at 1½M, for a standard HD floppy anyway.) In the end I used some tips from TomsRtBt to format a 1.7MB DOS floppy, copied the kernel onto that and ran SysLinux to make it bootable. This results in... the kernel panicking and dying when it gets to the end of the boot process and can't find a working root filesystem. It doesn't seem to understand about external USB drives. [Sigh]

The highly esteemed uon provided me with a bootable USB key with RUNT (a minimal version of Slackware) on, plus a floppy disk able to load the rest of the OS off the key, but the resulting environment is a little rudimentary. Trying to explore an unknown filesystem from the Linux command line is hard enough - I confess I'm a GUI kinda guy - but I also couldn't get it to mount a remote SMB filesystem over the network, so I had nowhere to recover the data to anyway.

Any suggestions? Does anyone know any cunning tricks to boot a PC from an external USB drive when its BIOS doesn't support this? I'm beginning to fear that the path of least resistance is to disembowel the machine, remove its HD, stick it in a desktop PC and suck the files off that way. Alternatively, I need to get a replacement internal optical drive - even a plain old CD-ROM would do just fine, but I fear it's going to have to be a special Sony one to fit.

Suggestons very welcome! I've thought of trying to make a DOS boot disk with NTFS and networking, but that won't be able to see or preserve all the long file names...

EDIT: On the base, it says it's a Vaio PCG-9C1L. On the bezel of the LCD, it says PCG-NVR23. Odd.