What a week… arg… so much lost productivity. Maybe this is just karma for my public slap of the Ohio State Buckeyes . At any rate, things started off bad, got frustrating, and then just got worse.
**Bad Thing #1 - Sunday: The Day QuickBooks Died…**On Monday night, as I watched the latter half of the NCAA Championship Game between Florida & Ohio State (did I mention GO GATORS! ?), I popped open my laptop to get some backlogged tasks wrapped up in QuickBooks. For the last week QuickBooks kept telling me there was an update to apply, but I kept putting it off. Well, finally I let it install. Well wasn’t that a bad decision. The next time I launched QuickBooks (QB), it complained about some bad qbregistration.dat file… that I should delete and reinstall QB. OK, no sweat. But that didn’t fix it. So that night and the course fo the following day, I uninstalled QB and reinstalled it so many times it’s not funny (seriously, you there, yeah you, the one reading this in your underwear with your coffee… stop laughing!). I was doing everything I could think of… delete anything in the registry related to Intuit, making sure my profile didn’t have any artifacts in it… etc. Nothing was fixing it. So I tried to call support… only to move on to the second bad thing…
**Bad Thing #2 - Monday: The Day the Phones Died…**I pickup the phone receiver and there’s no dialtone. CRAP! I use Vonage (voice-over-IP) for my business line. Thankfully I still had our personal landline (I work from home), but people were calling on my work line… I could tell as I get my voicemails emailed to me as WAV files. After a solid 1.5 hours on the line with Vonage tech support, it’s determined my phone adapter decided to die after 1.5 years. Sheesh… ok, I’ll go get a new one that night. Thankfully, CompUSA had what I needed (after Best Buy & Circuit City were sold out) and I was back up and running by mid-morning the following day.
But QuickBooks was still broken…
**Bad Thing #3 - Tuesday: The Day the Laptop Died…**I was in a state where I couldn’t get QuickBooks back up. Any small business owner (or independent consultant) knows, you live and die by QuickBooks. Then it dawned on me:
Dell finally released the Wave Security Suite for my D820 last week. Before I installed it on Sunday, I took an image of my primary Vista partition… and QB was working back then. So, I’ll just reimage my laptop and only lose what I had done on Sunday night, Monday & Tuesday morning (which was mostly email and a boat-load of uninstalls/reinstalls… so no data loss). While on a customer call, I ran the reimaging process… 1hr, 45m long. Then, with 5 seconds left: “Error: Invalid number of sectors in image.” I almost dropped an “oh [s-bomb]” on the customer conference call when I saw that.
Uh oh… I tried to boot… but I was stuck in an infinite loop of booting in to the Dell Hardware diagnostics.
CRAP! OK, so I drop in my Vista install disk and then I see what no one ever wants to see (unless if it is intentional): one big, 75GB unpartitoned block. OHHHHH CRAAAAAP… it’s all gone!
After entertaining my dogs with just about every 4-letter explitive (and possibly a few new ones thrown in), I sit down dejected, and plan out a course of action. I’ve been wanting to setup a dual boot on my laptop: a Vista boot I’ll use most of the time, and a Win2003 partition with MOSS installed which I use for presentations/workshops/webcasts/teaching. Got the Win2003 partition setup and imaged. It only takes about 10 minutes to reimage the partition so I can always start with a clean MOSS development environment whenever I need it. Not 100% sure if I go this route from here on out, or if I’ll revert back to Virtual PC for my MOSS development, but we’ll see. Next week will be the first test with a customer gig (of course, if my customer is reading this, I will have my backup Virtual PC environment onhand). If all goes as planned, I might do a writeup on how I did this. Would this interest you? If so, drop a comment on this post please.
So… around 4p yesterday, I finally had my Vista partition back up, all apps fully installed and configured. Almost have the MOSS development partition all setup too, just a few last minute things to address. Oh… and QuickBooks is working again. Thankfully, I could explore the drive image I took last weekend and extract specific files out, so there was virtually no data loss. Suffice to say, I am re-evaluating my backup & disaster recovery strategy.
Is it Friday yet? Sheesh… what a week…