Category: Geek

Last night was an unsuccessful round one of me versus the D-Link

wireless router belonging to my friend Leesh’s parents. Normally,

Leesh’s husband, my old University buddy George would handle this, but he lives in New York. I’m all too happy to lend a hand to my best man’s in-laws.

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For the technically inclined, it keeps timing out before getting an IP

address from Rogers Cablesystems’ DHCP server. I know it’s not a

problem at Rogers’ end, because the ‘net is accessible if you simply

run cat-5 directly from the cable modem to the computer works. The

firmware in the D-Link is up-to-date, too.

Earlier this year, I hooked up a Linksys wireless router to my Mom’s

Rogers cable broadband service without any problems; it just worked. I may bring mine over to Leesh’s parents’ place this Sunday and see if it works.

By sheer coincidence, I have a free trial of Roger’s cable braodband

service at my current house. I’ve taken the D-Link home to noodle with

it in the meantime.

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Speaking of cable modem difficulties, those of you who are familiar

with the nuances of swearing in Quebecois French will probably enjoy this

recording of an irate cable modem subscriber unloading much bile upon a

poor tech support rep at Quebec cable provider Videotron [576KB, MP3, language warning if you speak Quebecois French]. Even if you can’t understand a word, this guy’s mile-a-minute delivery of venom is priceless.

(Need a Quebecois swearing guide? Try here and here.)

First of all, everybody who commented or sent me an email regarding my inaccessible directory problem from the previous entry: thanks for writing in!

Secondly, give yourselves all a pat on the back for knowing it was an ownership/permissions problem.

Finally, the big prize goes to Martey Dodoo (who also has a blog, titled This is Martey Dodoo) for pointing me to what I couldn’t find — the way to call up the correct dialog box for changing the ownership of a directory.

In the Unix command line world, the chown

command, which rhymes with “clone” and not

“town”, does this (it’s also where the title to this entry comes from).

Martey’s solution was the simplest thing

that could possibly work and took all of 3 or so minutes to carry out.

It took 10 seconds of mouse clicks and 3 minutes for the hard disk to

chug to

change permissions on a buttload of files.

I’ll have to document the problem and the solution on this blog to

ensure that people who get into the same predicament will be more

likely to find it when they Google for a solution.

Once again, thank you everyone for your assistance.

Special note for Martey: Please email me your snail mail address so I can send you a little “thank you” token!

While repartitioning my home Windows XP box’s hard drive —

something I’vce done at least half a dozen times before —  I have

rendered my old “My Documents” folder inaccessible to me. If you’ve

seen this before and have a suggestion, I’d appreciate it!

Here’s what happened:

• I used to have two partitions created using PartitionMagic  on my 160GB drive: 120 for Windows XP, 40 for Mandrake Linux.
• I was running out of space on the Windows side, and since I do

  most things Unix-y on my Mac, I decided to reclaim the 40GB that

  Mandrake was using. I used PartitionMagic and set it up to delete the

  Mandrake partition and then append it to the Windows partition.

• No, I didn’t make a backup. Bad move on my part. I was tired.
• PartitionMagic did its thing, reclaiming the partition. It then

  rebooted the system, and on rebooting, the monitor displayed “L 99 99

  99 99 99 99…” in text mode and the computer stopped. Just a little

  MBR (Master Boot Record) problem; nothing I haven’t seen before and

  easy to fix.

• With the MBR fixed, I was able to boot into Windows. The problem:

  PartitionMagic left a program that runs on boot-up that restarts the

  machine. Which boots into Windows, which then hits this program, which

  reboots the machine. Which boots into Windows, which then hits this

  program…

  I can’t find where PartitionMagic put this program.

• I try a little trick that’s worked for me before. I reinstall

  Windows XP without erasing the partition first. I get the standard

  warning and reinstall Windows into a new directory, C:\WINXP (the

  original is in C:\WINDOWS). The main user of the old system was

  “Administrator”; the main user of the new system is “Joey deVilla”.

• I now boot into Windows. Under C:\Documents and Settings, I see

  the old “Administrator” folder, the “My Documents” folder for my old

  system and where all my files are stored. I try to open it, I get this:

  ACCESS DENIED

  Windows reports that this folder’s file size is 0.

Looking at the hard drive capacity, I see that all my old files

are still on it — about 118GB of my hard drive is already taken up

with files. I just can’t get to them.

(I’ve done this before and have always been able to get back to my old

“My Documents” folder. Damned if I can figure out why this time is

different.)

Most of what’s in this is eaither backed up of easily replaceable. What

I really want are the past few months’ photos, which I can never

replace, although having my MP3 collection would be a bonus.

Anyone know how I can get to these files? Let me know either via email or in the comments!