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All together at VMware

Posted on 28 Apr 2009 at 12:34

Jon Honeyball returns from VMware Europe 2009 optimistic about the big picture for vmware, and tries not to laugh at other people's desktops.

A second tale of woe started with the inevitable phone call: "The computer won't boot, Jon. It just sits there and says 'missing boot loader' or something." This is a call that strikes fear into my heart, and I popped round to be greeted with a fine cup of tea and slice of cake (you know they're really desperate when a Temple Offering is made as you walk through the door). I had hoped that their problem would be limited to a screwed-up BIOS. If the BIOS boot order gets scrambled then the machine can attempt to boot from, say, the CD drive and then keel over if nothing is found there. Unfortunately, it was plain to see that there was nothing wrong with the BIOS and that the hard drive was genuinely toast.

What to do? The trembling lower lip indicated that merely throwing this disk away and putting in a new one wasn't going to be a popular option, because not only was there no backup of the data held on the dead disk, but their OS installation DVD was noticeable by its absence because "the shop just put it on for me". I didn't think local shops still did that nonsense, but it seems they do. I took the smoking wreck back to my lab and connected its hard disk up to a spare Vista box, which could see almost nothing on the disk - it saw there was a partition, but wasn't sure what format, and no data was visible. I had to try something...

A poke around on the internet took me to the page of Easeus Data Recovery wizard at http://www.easeus.com. Normally I'm very untrusting of this sort of program, but a spin of the trialware offering suggested that it was worth forking over the money to buy a licence (the trial version doesn't actually recover files). Having left the machine for a couple of hours scrubbing its way through that wounded partition, it came up with a huge list of files and directories that it believed it had located. Clearly, much of this was just digital garbage - files that were just fragments of real files, caused by far too much directory damage - but there was some hope in the shape of a big list of directories sorted by data type, PDF, DOC, GIF and so on. A glance through these showed that all of the directory structure had gone, but many of the files were worth restoring. And then, much to my amazement, it located the desktop directory for the main user and managed to reconstruct all the document folders underneath it. I pulled back all that I thought was worthwhile and dropped the files onto a spare USB hard drive, and when the owner popped by he was amazed that so much had been saved. A new computer has now been purchased.

I have no idea what so comprehensively hand-grenaded that XP computer. Its file system was FAT32, and yes, NTFS would have been more robust. I suspect some sort of nasty malware that takes out boot and root directory information. I'd have to recommend Easeus because it did the apparently impossible. There's much to dislike about the product - it looks old-fashioned, clumsy and geeky - but it did do the job well enough in the face of disaster, and for that it's certainly a tool worth considering if you're facing a similar problem.

Apple browser

Apple is to be applauded for its new release of the beta of Safari 4 for Windows. This is a red-hot-fast browser, so much so that I've moved over to it in preference to Firefox 3. It introduces some gorgeous new user interface constructs - putting all the pages into a scrollable iTunes-like browser view is stunning, and shows that there's still room for considerable innovation in this area. Microsoft doesn't have all the tricks in IE8, although it will probably be sufficient for most people on Windows 7.

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