#654 Sunday Defrag

Busy day today. It's pouring out, so I can't take stuff down to the basement, but I at least moved more containers to nearer the door and dusted off more shelf space in the basement.

I called the Hunk about the chimney work, watered the plants, made the hotel reservation for the trip to Ricketts Glen, took the van to the service station, dropped off the key with a note about what's wrong, picked up the rental car, and paid some bills. All I need to do now is wash my hair.

Last night, about 10 pm, I started a defragmenting run on the PC, and as of about 5 pm today it still wasn't finished. It says the "drive's content has changed: restarting..." about every 90 seconds. I had stopped everything except "creative launcher", "explorer", "rundll", and "systray". I don't really know what those things ARE, but either they won't or can't go away when I say "end task" on ctrl/alt/delete, so whatever they do, there's no way to stop them.

I finally gave up and called Hercules, and he said it might be my virus scanner waking up every so often. I finally just gave up on it. I'd really like to figure it out, though. This dog is getting slower and slower.

Roman called this evening, and he agreed it's probably the virus scanner. That, or a virus. Gack! And he says I should be able to stop "rundll", and that "creative launcher" must be something Jay added. Jay "improved" and recoded a lot of standard stuff on this machine, which is one of the biggest problems in maintaining it. A lot of it is nonstandard, and you don't know what until you run right into it.

I was shuffling through some old CDs this afternoon, and I found the backups Jay had made when he first installed this Windows 98 SE. There was also a disk labeled "Drives C and D Backup", AND one labeled "Drives E and F Backup".

E and F?

C and D are hard disks, but "My Computer" doesn't know anything about E or F. Roman says that Jay had obviously partitioned the hard disk (hence C and D), and it's possible that E and F are "hidden" partitions - which would explain why Jay had told me we had xx gigabytes of hard drive, but when I ask the computer how much we have, it shows a lot less. It would be interesting to find out what's on that E and F backup CD.

Roman says there is usually a way to make the hidden disks available by hitting a particular key (possibly a function key) on IPL, but there's no way to know what key, and there's probably a partitioning program around that I maybe could get to E and F through, but it's one of those things you don't touch unless you know exactly what you're doing.

Yeah, every once in a while I see that program, and so far I have resisted playing with it.

(I haven't seen anything associated with the AAVIT partnership on the visible disks, so I'll bet that's where it all is. And probably IBM stuff from when he was working from home. That doesn't seem to exist anywhere else, either.)

Oh, well. I am going to buy a new machine sometime soon. After I get the den cleaned out, I think. I guess I can limp along until then....