Now I have to go downstairs and be sociable with Kristen as it’s New Years Eve! Doesn’t feel like it though. Working in the office until 5pm makes it feel just like an ordinary day. Mind you, we don’t often get ordinary days where a customers server falls over as they only have 1mb left on their C: drive, 3000+ print jobs in the print queue and an administrator who doesn’t know what the password,what remote control software, or the ip address is!

Had some fun hacking on my own pc this evening. I decided to try and get my XP partition back on one of my W2k Servers. When I installed w2k on the box (after xp had been on there) it destroyed the Master Boot Record and I was unable to get into XP. Unfortunately in order to get into the recovery console (by booting off the xp cd) I needed the “administrator” password (I only ever remember logging on as my user so for whatever reason I did not know/could not remember the admin password).
A quick google search later and I had found NTPasswd to change the administrator password. I did this, rebooted and it still wouldn’t let me into the box. I then tried again and changed the administrators password and my own user password. Rebooted back off the XP CD, entered the new password and I was back into the recovery console.
Then ran Fixboot, attrib -hsa on ntldr,ntdetect.com, copied these files to another name (for safekeeping) and then copied these files off the i386 directory on the XP CD back onto what Microsoft call the system partition (where boot.ini is stored). A quick reboot and it still didn’t work. This was because w2k/myself had messed the order of the partitions on the disk, so xp was no longer in the same number partition. A quick copy/paste of the lines for XP, changing the partition number on each line and a trial and error selection of the alternatives and I was in……almost.
For some reason XP would not take the new password for my user. A quick change into administrator and using the new password meant I could then change the password for my user, log back in and everything is ok! Phew!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hope that helps someone! (thanks to Windows Annoyances for the guidance!)

“Sorry we are out of office until the 3rd of January 2003, normal service will resume after this period.” is not the sort of response I want from my webhosting company 🙁

Had to add Et Cetera, the first library weblog in the UK. Found it whilst reading my wife’s library newspaper. Seeing as though sometimes she jokes about me having a blog – maybe I should persuade her library to start one up. A quick search on google for UK Library blogs (using Snip to shorten the URL’s) came up with two. The previously mentioned one and David Little’s one

Thanks to Melanie, my archives are now monthly – taking up less real estate and you still get a weeks worth of stuff from me on this web page. Thanks for pointing out the obvious Melanie – I should have checked that out again!

I’ve also remembered why I was not going to go monthly on the archives in Blogger. If I do that, then it means there are a month worth of posts on the main page, which can then take a long time to load. (although as I don’t use tables it does load sequentially rather than waiting for the whole lot to be downloaded before displaying anything).So thats why. If you don’t like the amount of space the archive listing takes up, then disable them from being shown by using the customisation options in the top right hand corner of the web page.

Added the Fishtank photo album as Kristen has sold the tank. These shots were taken on the last day we had it. They’ve gone to a local home and the guy who’s brought it seems to be real keen on the fish. Album was generated using Web Album Generator (which I like to use for the layout of the thumbnails across the top of the page and it’s navigation) and E-Mage for the Web to create the thumbnails over the top of the thumbnails that WAG creates. I am not happy with the quality of the pictures that WAG creates – it would be nice to choose the compression rates. I’m probably going to write my own ASP html album generator to create the pages similar to WAG but use prebuilt thumbnails from external sources such as E-Mage. I’d write the thumbnail generator myself except a) I don’t know how and b) most of the existing asp frontends require you to install a dll or com object on the server which I and other people would not have access to.

A couple of weeks ago I shot this picture of a waterfall. It looked quite nice, but stank something awful! I was quite pleased with the end result though. Click on the thumbnail for the usual fullsize picture.

Courtesy of Lockergnome, this utility lets you see the passwords saved in IE’s autocomplete and outlook express for the currently logged on user. For shared access pc’s this could be very interesting! Definately one to go in my techsupport folder on my USBDrive