I fixed it

Hmmm. I should have learned from yesterday not to mess with things even if I think I can fix them quickly. I tried to merge Laura's partitions this morning with a utility from her Compaq stuff. That was probably my biggest mistake—I should have just started with PartitionMagic. Anyways, that utility somehow failed and left things in a very weird state. A very long scandisk later, I tried PartitionMagic to merge them. That short of worked. Of course, this was all taking a lot of time—I was doing it at work, and working in between tasks. PartitionMagic sort of worked—it seemed like it was in a closer state, but it wouldn't boot. So then I went and ran scandisk again, and the file system's all messed up. First the two FAT tables are disagreeing, which means that a lot of files out there got corrupted in the merge. So I ran scandisk again, and by now it was pretty late in the afternoon (these things take a lot of time—I just passed the time by working and changing utilities to my name). In fact, it was way passed the point that I was supposed to deliver the laptop to Laura. And on top of it all, it was getting pretty close to the time for ward sports night. So I decided I'd take the laptop home, hope it'd finish on the drive home, and get ready for sports night. Laura was suppose to have a meeting of some sort at 7:00, so I figured I'd just bring it by later. Only when I got home, my internet connection was down because of having changed the account to my name. I had to set things up again. This kind of sucked because I wanted to try windows update again before I gave the computer back to Laura (this time, no turning the power off while it's updating). I tried to fix the connection, but apparently Comcast didn't give me all the information I need. So I called them up and asked for the information, only instead of just giving it to me, the tech decided to walk me threw the process. Well, to make a long story short, my desktop computer crashed hard and my laptop couldn't permanently acquire an IP from the cable modem. It'd acquire it, but not be able to do anything. Two hours later (yes, this ate a lot of my daytime minutes), and a tech support lady later, I figure out to my embarrassment that I'm using a cross-over cable to connect to the modem. I'm still a little frustrated about having spent all that time on such a stupid problem. It never occurred to me that it was a crossover cable, though. I thought they weren't supposed to connect at all. Anyways, Laura called during all this asking me where I was and so as soon as I got this all figured out (about 9:30), I rushed over there and gave it to her. I also did the windows update over there. We did discover that her video on Windows Media Player is a little messed up—some videos play fine, but some have no video (just audio). So I need to figure that out. I really wish I hadn't screwed up her computer, though. There's so much other stuff I need to get caught up on right now. And I'm sure it inconvenienced her a lot.

Posted September 03, 2003 (11:13 PM) | Comments (1)