tubby, little, cubby, all stuffed with fluff

So far so good…

I’ve been annoyed for a while by my lack of disk space. Thinkpads don’t ship with recovery CDs. Instead, they devote about 5 GB of space on the hard drive to a hidden recovery partition. That’s a lot of space! I wanted it back.

However, I was wary about doing it, knowing that the possibility for an error was high. I prepared by (a) creating a set of recovery discs, (b) creating an “Ultimate Boot CD”, and© doing a full backup. First those three steps:

Recovery Discs: On my computer, I went to Programs > Access IBM > Create Recovery Discs. This part was weird and I’m not sure that I did it 100% correctly. They say that it should take about 6 blank CDs. It made those first 6 CDs just fine… and then kept going, spitting out virtually blank CDs (which each had a single .ini file). Each of those .ini files indicated that it was not the last disc in the sequence, so my hope/plan is that if I ever need those discs, I’ll write a single new 7th CD which has the same .ini file… but says it’s the last in the sequence. Keep your fingers crossed for me that I’ll never need to use it!

Side note: if you make Recovery CDs, don’t lose them! Apparently you can only make one copy, ever.

Here’s a web page I referenced, though it doesn’t say much more than what I’ve said.

Ultimate Boot CD: I’ve actually had my UBCD 4 Win for a while so I don’t recall the directions. It was a somewhat complicated process requiring a Windows XP CD (fortunately, I’d bought one a while back). The UBCD was what I used to repartition my drive, so if you have another solution you like, you can use that!

Full Backup: I’m still using Windows Backup for my backup/recovery needs. I don’t particularly like it, so if anyone has suggestions on a free alternative, let me know!

Doing the Deed

Now that I was ready, it was time to reclaim that partition! I want to preface this that this really probably shouldn’t be attempted by the faint of heart. I ended up with no major problems (yet), but it’s probably easy to make a mistake and give yourself a big computer problem.

I started by rebooting my computer and going into the Recovery Partition (press Access IBM or F11) during boot. I looked at all the menu options and chose Access BIOS which told me to reboot again and press F1 instead. Oh well.

In the BIOS, I went to Security > IBM Predesktop Area and switched it from Normal to Disabled, which allows the OS to see the area. It warned me that it was a rather stupid thing I was doing. I said, “Go ahead!”

Rebooted again into the UBCD4Win disk, which is a lovely little thing. I didn’t really know what I was looking to do… here’s a good place to be careful and read everything three times! I went into the Disk Management utility where I saw my whole drive with its 32 GB partition and the missing 5 GB partition. I deleted the 5 GB partition and then not knowing what to do, tried recreating it and reformatting it as NTFS. Reboot.

Operating System not detected. I hate those words. After freaking out a little, I decided to reboot into my UBCD. I noted that I hadn’t set my main drive to be the “active partition.” I switched it to C: (actually, I’d done that before) and set it as the active partition.

Then I thought, I really want a big drive, rather than a second smaller partition. I deleted the service area partition again and found another program called DiskPart. Command line without good instructions… Scary! “Help” worked, of course, so I started there.

I selected the correct disk, partition and volume (disk 0, partition 1, volume 1, in my case) and then asked it to give me the details of the volume to make sure I’d selected the right one. “Extend.” Phew! That seemed to work!

Reboot. Success! Or so it seems so far… I’ve tried a bunch of programs and most everything seems to be running well. I did have a minor casualty of a program called Magnifying Glass Pro that I got off of giveawayoftheday.com, but I count myself lucky.

If you’re doing this process too, I wish you the best! I’m glad the process is over for me!

Oh yeah.  Here’s the other page that I referenced.

Good luck!

So… The second worst thing that happened on February 17th was that I slipped and fell on the ice while taking out the garbage on my way to California and I shattered the LCD on my until-recently trusty computer. (The worst thing was that my absolutely wonderful girlfriend woke up with a terrible case of food poisoning.)

You can see the results of the carnage here:

Getting it repaired by IBM/Lenovo would have cost about $1000 which I wasn’t willing to pay. I could have gotten a brand new LCD from ScreenTek who seemed pretty reputable. In the end, though, I decided to buy a used LCD and cover off of eBay for a total of about $165. (I figured that the hardware is starting to get obsolete, so shelling out $400 for a brand new LCD wasn’t worth it. Of course, I have some concerns that my replacement cover is from a T40, but I still have the original inverter and other parts from my computer, so I figure I can swap those in if anything fails.)

Anyway, I just wanted to record my process and some of the “gotchas” along the way.

1. (of course) Unplug the power cord and the battery pack.
2. Remove the keyboard and wristpad/bezel screws from the bottom of the computer. They have little pictures to indicate the correct screws. The keyboard screws have a little picture of a keyboard and the wristpad screws have a rectangle with 4 little dots on it (there are a lot of these). Of course, you’ll want to keep the screws in a safe place and preferably separated by number (each screw hole should have a number by it to tell you which screw fits). You may not need to remove the section that has the touchpad, but I did… To remove that, you’ll need to use a small screwdriver or blade to remove the screw covers.
3. Remove the keyboard. This may be helpful. It basically comes right off with a little pressure. You may want to snap off the separate plastic piece on top of the power button/volume/Access IBM buttons… That just came off on mine while I was fiddling with stuff. Be a little careful with the keyboard connector, but I didn’t have any problems.
4. Remove the touchpad piece. As I mentioned before, I’m not sure that this is necessary, but I did it. Again, it came right off and be a little careful with the connector.
5. Remove the rest of the bezel. I needed to remove an additional screw on the top of the machine to get this off. It was on the left hand side (as you face the computer) near the PCMCIA slot.
6. Remove the screws for the hinges. These are not labeled but most are obvious. There are 3 on the right and 4 on the left. Each have 2 on the back and 1 on the bottom. The left side has an additional one on top that isn’t revealed until you remove the bezel.

1. Disconnect the antennae from the wireless card. These should snap off with minimal pressure. Just wiggle ‘em around a little.

1. Unthread the antennae carefully from the machine. Note how they go, but it shouldn’t be hard to figure out how to get the new ones in place.
2. Remove lid and swap in new one!

1. Now you just need to reverse the steps from above. Nothing particularly tricky… just be careful.

Voila! I’m working on a good screen again. Hooray!

One minor sadness… I DO have a single misfiring pixel on my screen although it had been working fine before it was sent to me (according to the vendor). I tried to repair it by flashing it with a video file I found here. That didn’t seem to work, but I may try again.

I could, of course, have sent the screen back, but it was enough of an ordeal… I’ll live with it!

Continuing my “series of things I’ve been working on”, Children of Rural China is one of the most important organizations I’ve been involved with for a number of reasons:

1. I have always had a deep affection for the people of Xinjiang, ever since I spent a summer there in 2000. I’ve wanted to contribute back to a people who have taught me so much!
2. I’m interested in figuring out ways to make significant impact in the world, especially in the arena of education. The challenges often seem insurmountable to me, and yet I believe that smart investment pays big dividends.

1. T is the co-chair.

This past year I’ve been serving as de facto webmaster, and a few months ago I finished a revamping of the website. I’m particularly pleased with a CSS (highly accessible), fairly JavaScript-free menu system, with lots of help from A List Apart. (This is what gets this post the “How-To” tag.)

I’m applying to join the board as the official webmaster and perhaps in other capacities as well. I’m excited about the opportunity to get more involved, though truly deep involvement will probably have to wait until I move back up to Cambridge.

P.S. If you like CRCF’s site, or even if you just like me, would you consider posting a link to the site? I’m trying to bump up its PageRank in Google. Actually, now that I take a look, the PageRank of my website is a big goose egg, and could benefit from link love too.

So over the past week or so I’ve been spending way too much time trying to burn a DVD to SVCD (on WinXP). There are a lot of pretty good programs (and documentation) out there, but I thought I’d just let you all know about my experience hoping that it might prove helpful for you. As always, I tried to use free programs to do it.

I started out with Sefy’s Guide from videohelp.com and I somewhat arbitrarily chose to start with the guide for Eazy VCD which you can get at eazyvcd.tk.

I mostly chose defaults, putting my output in a new directory, choosing to keep the temp files, and choosing to stop at the MPEG step. That’s important because the audio/video on the MPEG ended up being out of sync.

I halted the MPEG in mid-rip and deleted that file. Then I ran TMPGEnc (which was installed in the Eazy VCD folder). Again I chose mostly defaults, but I also:

• Edited the source range in order to correct the audio gap. I used 400 msec for my file but I’d recommend that you test a small segment to find what’s right for you.

• Clipped the frame using a black mask to get rid of the edge noise.

(Note that the version of TMPGEnc bundled with Eazy VCD can only burn MPEG2 for 30 days. You can find earlier versions without that limitation but I didn’t use them so I’m not sure how well they’ll work.)

Now that I had an MPEG2 suitable for an SVCD, I wanted to burn it. This is where it got tricky (well, okay, I spent a lot of time trying to sync the audio too).

The first time I created a BIN/CUE set, I used VCDWizard. It appears, in retrospect, that the BIN/CUE files that it created were corrupt in some way. I ended up using VCDEasy to both create the BIN/CUE and to burn them, but I grabbed an earlier version (1.1.2) which is still free from here. I also picked up ASPI drivers for WinXP from here.

Here’s what I did in VCDEasy

• Settings -> (S)VCD Player: Checked Update scan data offsets
• Settings -> CDRDAO: Forced generic-mmc driver
• (S)VCD -> Main: Picked appropriate settings and added the MPEG2 file.

• (S)VCD -> Chapers: Added chapter breaks. They ended up not exactly where I wanted them, but close enough, I guess. (I think forcing the exact chapter breaks may have been what was wrong with my original BIN/CUE files.)

Then I clicked Go. After the BIN/CUE/XML set was created, I went to Tools -> CDRDAO Tools, loaded the CUE and clicked Burn (don’t forget to put a blank CD in first).

And that’s it! My SVCD seems to play quite well on my computer’s DVD player. It doesn’t play quite correctly on my actual DVD player, but I suspect that might be because my player is so old. I’d like to test it out on a newer player one of these days.

Virtual CD
Oh, and for those of you who were only interested in the Virtual CD segment, while I was looking around for VCDs and burning, I ran across a link to a neat little program (unofficially) from Microsoft. It allows you to mount ISOs as virtual drives. Useful for checking if an ISO is good, and potentially useful for playing computer games that require the disc to be in the drive (haven’t tested that yet). You can get that here.