Friday, December 14, 2007
First day back at work since last Friday. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Today after logging in to OS X I started Parallels and my day went downhill from there. Parallels notified me that a new version (5582) was available to be more compatible with Leopard, so I said Yes to download it in the background. Windows XP was about to start, however, so I attempted to shut it down, but Parallels hung with the beach ball of death and after several minutes I force quit because there appeared to be nothing else I could do. I installed the new version of Parallels, and now when I launch it it hangs. I attempt to restart in Boot Camp, hoping I'll see different behavior, and I do: blue screen of death, UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME, STOP 0x000000ED. I restart in Safe Mode with the Windows installation (not Parallels—tho I am not sure what the difference is). I log in successfully as local admin. I request scandisk, then restart so that the scandisk will run. I restart as before (Safe Mode with the Windows—not Parallels—installation), and it appears to hang while loading drivers. Caps lock key doesn't toggle as expected. Cold restart. Keyboard stops working after several seconds at the Windows Advanced Options menu. Cold restart. Started as before (Safe Mode with the Windows—not Parallels—installation). Appears to hang while loading drivers. Cold restart. Started Safe Mode with Command Prompt with Windows (not Parallels) installation. Appears to hang while loading drivers. Booted into Recovery Console with my Windows XP cdrom (hold the Option key while booting with the cdrom in the drive). Ran chkdsk /r. chkdsk completes successfully, fixing 1 or more errors on the volume. Restart normally. Blue screen of death, UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME, STOP 0x000000ED. Restart into Recovery Console. Ran fixboot. Restart normally. Blue screen of death, UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME, STOP 0x000000ED. Restart into Recovery Console. Recovery Console hangs while attempting to start. Cold restart into Recovery Console. Ran bootcfg /rebuild followed by fixmbr. Restart normally. Windows starts and a disk check has been scheduled. It says I can press a key to skip the disk check, but I press a key and nothing happens. Disk check runs until I leave work shortly after 6:00 PM. When I return to work on Monday, I'll find out if my 8 hours of work today was worth anything. On Eric's computer, he too said that Parallels gave him the beach ball of death but because I told him of my experiences he was able to exit Windows before the download. I think it's safer to get this update manually from the Parallels website than to use their autodownload mechanism. Consequently, I got very little done today—thanks, Parallels! I still love you anyway. While waiting for chkdsk and scandisk, I cleaned up my desk some and also did a bunch of computer maintenance: Fx 2.0.0.11 and QuickTime 7.3.1 updates. Lunch today was Panda Express. The black pepper chicken is too spicy for me even though they say it is only black pepper. Joel had a taste and said it was too spicy for him, too. I suspect they also throw in a little bit of white pepper that's not easily seen. My fortune: Versatility is one of your outstanding traits. (!). Many of the items I ordered for my new computer at home had arrived while I was out of the office due to illness. (I deliver to work since it's easier for me to receive packages there.) So I asked Patrick to pick me up in the car to haul it all home. It's like an early Christmas, for me anyway. Patrick doesn't understand what all the excitement is about. He doesn't know the joys of an 8-port gigabit switch or 4 GB of SO-DIMM or Parallels Desktop 3.0, but I bet he'll enjoy the new iMac that is yet to be unwrapped. Thanks again to sneeper, who made the Mac purchase possible. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers. I had leftover homemade chicken noodle soup. He had leftover chicken curry. For dessert, we each had a butter pecan cookie that Joel had so generously made—perfectly delicious, buttery and crisp! To bed earlyish.