SpinRite on VMWare

I know that the SpinRite FAQ specifies that as long as you can see the drive in DOS you should be able to use SpinRite on it.  However, some of my external USB drives do not seem to work with the DOS drivers I find on the Internet.  Anyway, I had a thought that maybe I could run SpinRite in VMWare, and I found that someone had done it on a Mac.

I have a good news for mister Gibson: SpinRite would actually work on the Mac with VMWare

So I took the idea for a test drive.  I guess I wanted to make sure that those external drives would last a bit longer especially hearing from my friend that one of his drives died recently (good thing it was RAIDed).  I created a small virtual machine and made it use the physical drive which points to my USB drive.  Then I created the ISO image from the SpinRite executable and made the VM boot to the ISO image.

Before I start anything I run chkdsk /f on the drive to make sure that there are no open handles on the drive itself.  Once that completes I started the VM.

It seems to work quite well.  There is no SMART support though, but I guess that is fine according to the screen it says that maintenance and recovery operations remain functional.

It is quite slow.  An estimate of over 6 hours for a 80Gig hard drive on level 4.

Screenshots of my Windows XP desktop

Earlier I talked about how I customized my Linux desktop to look like Vista. Recently, I found a theme that brings me closer to what I want: A LunaQQ theme with Vista buttons. Currently my screen looks like this using the "Vista Inspirat" theme. Here is how my desktop generally used to look with the Luna QQ theme. Overall I like the modifications done by the "Vista Inspirat" over the other Vista based themes I have seen that copy almost every single widget of Vista thickness and all. Vista Inspirat uses a noticeably thinner task bar compared to Vista. It is similar to that of LunaQQ actually. Along with that it uses the Vista style minimize, maximize and open buttons. Now here are a list of improvements I wish someone can make to the "Vista Inspirat" theme.

• Darker borders for the active window. Currently its hard to distinguish between active and incative windows in this theme, they are both bright.
• Either get rid of the photo on the Start menu, or change the fonts and move things around so my name would actually fit.
• I think it could stand to lose a couple more pixels on the top of the window. The top border looks a bit on the thick side.
• Remove the rounded corners at the bottom part of the window, that would probably getr rid of a few more pixels at the bottom part of the window.
• Make the start button a tad bit smaller, I don't mean make it like KDE which is the size of one icon, but no more than 3 icon sizes. It looks like its about 3 1/2 to 4 icons in size.
• Make it available in blue, I like blue :)

Back to Windows XP for the nth time: Mandriva sucks

Well recently I tried Mandriva 2007 on my desktop PC hoping to find a replacement for Windows as a desktop OS. Unfortunately I switched back to Windows again. Guess I am stuck with Windows XP for a while longer (unless I choose to get a new computer that is). I think the clincher was that rdesktop (a free MS Terminal Services Client) does not repaint correctly when I scroll up through code in Eclipse or a list of emails in Notes (it is only when I go up, down scrolling works fine). The problem also manifests when I collapse a branch in a tree widget in Eclipse. I use rdesktop a lot so if this does not work correctly, then its a hard abort (just like the lack of network scanner, network printer, network fax and Bluetooth cellphone sync). Too bad though, I've tweaked KDE to work almost the way I wanted (I even got rid of that trash can). Which is basically like Ubuntu's Gnome default, but with a little tweak here and there. Some things that I didn't like with the KDE UI are:

• The menu buttons in the panel can only be icons. I wanted it to be text in certain situations since I use "tiny" size on my panel it takes a bit of dexterity to click on the small icon. Gnome is okay with this one.
• Xgl does not support multiple desktops with KDE. Gnome is okay with this one.
• Right clicking on the Trash panel icon does not bring up the context menu so I can empty it.
• Alt-F2 for the run menu instead of "Window-R"
• "Window-R" brings up the K-menu instead of the run dialog
• "Window-F" brings up the K-menu instead of the find dialog
• Basically the Window key + anything brings up the K-menu rather than treating it like a modifier. I think this is a limitation on the X server itself rather than KDE or Gnome.
• I can't seem to get the desktop widgets to popup. But then I haven't googled much on this one.

With all the complaints about KDE, why do I even bother? Well some key things that pushed me towards KDE:

• Bluetooth worked. I can see and transfer files to my Nokia 6230i. Although I still couldn't get it to sync. In Gnome, it sees my cell phone, but does not make any associations with it.
• I like Kopete because it gives me some hope that my webcam may work. Although it doesn't.
• I like the notion of KWallet which stores all the passwords in one convenient location. Although Firefox does not use it.
• I like the Crystal window decoration (its like cheap Vista). Though I am pretty sure if I try hard enough, I would be able to pull that in Gnome anyway.
• KDE has an automatic wallpaper switcher built in.
• KDE's file browser acts like a browser rather than the way Windows 95 used to work. Although there was a setting to change that in Gnome hidden in gconf so I was able to get around that limitation.

I've gotten a bit further with the network printer on Mandriva than I did with Ubuntu or PC-BSD. I see the printer in the CUPS server, but I still cannot print. Nor can I scan or fax. Although Mandriva pulls in the Microsoft TrueType fonts such as Tahoma and Trebuchet MS. It still was not able to pull in my new favourite UI font: Segoe UI. So my UI still does not look a clean cut as my patched XP using Luna QQ. Mandriva also uses Firefox 1.5 and since it is just an RPM based system, you have to go grab 2.0 yourself and to the installation yourself rather than relying on an RPM installer. The excuse being that 2.0 is buggy. There is no BitTorrent client that is in Mandriva's packages either. I had to download and install KTorrent manually through downloaded RPMs. Unfortunately, I couldn't even get any downloads started with the thing. It does not "just work" like uTorrent does for Windows. The software update function of Mandriva has no "select all" in their package update UI. This means that I have to individually select the updates and click on apply. It is too bad that Mandriva was not enough to get me to switch yet. I liked how a lot of things just worked out of the box unlike Ubuntu. However, there are still some major glitches with it in terms of a full user experience. So it will just be remaining in its partition almost never to be used again.