Author: Brandon

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Migrating a boot partition to a new drive in Windows

I installed a new hard drive on my wife’s machine because she kept running out of space. I didn’t have the time or inclination to do a new Windows XP install, and didn’t want to install the drive as a secondary because that means she would constantly have to redirect where stuff is installed, so I decided to transfer the old drive data to the new drive.

I got her a Western Digital drive, so I figured I’d try using their utility to do the transfer. The Western Digital Data Lifeguard boot CD-ROM utility failed to copy the old partition to the new drive with an unspecified error. (Come on! Cryptic errors are better than nothing!)

So I tried using the GParted LiveCD. It took a long time just to get something visible on the screen, mucking around in interactive boot mode. Finally, I got it to copy the partition to the new disc and resize it. Or so it told me. It took an hour but the target drive was not bootable. I checked all the partition flags and even booted the Windows install CD in recovery mode to rewrite the boot sector (FIXBOOT), and when that didn’t work, the MBR (FIXMBR) and boot sector. It just wouldn’t boot — and no error messages from the BIOS either (how nice).

Finally, I downloaded Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0.

This program is awesome. It is what all low level utilities should be. It just works. I was hesitant to try anything that didn’t run off a boot disc, assuming that I was asking for trouble running a program in Windows to copy the boot partition to a new drive. But it was easy and clear, and apparently Acronis really knows how to make Windows do low-level stuff the right way. It re-booted the system into the UI mode that I’ve only seen chkdsk run in and copied the partition to the new drive, then told me it was done and I could remove the old drive and reconfigure the system to boot from the new drive. And it just worked.

I copied a partition from an 80 gigabyte parallel ATA drive to a 250 gigabyte serial ATA (SATA) drive. The partition was automatically expanded to fill the new space, and I didn’t need to defrag afterwards even though the source drive was pretty fragmented — apparently it does more than just a blind copy of the clusters.

Anyway, this program is awesome and worked perfectly. I just wanted to sing its praises and hope this might help someone else avoid the hassle I went through learning about it.

SwordSearcher 5.2 Released

A new version of SwordSearcher Bible Software is now available: version 5.2.

As I mentioned before, this new version adds “words of Christ in red letters” for the KJV, and also gives the ability to restrict a Bible search to just the words of Christ. The Deluxe study library also adds the following modules:

  • Morrish Bible Dictionary
  • Calvin’s Commentaries
  • Sketches of Jewish Social Life and The Temple: Its Ministry and Services

See the revision history for a complete list of new features.

Stupid customer service tricks

My life insurance company has an automated system for contacting customers who miss a premium payment. You see, I got a new policy and I am allowing the old one to expire. My agent told me to simply not pay the bill from the old policy.

So this automated system calls me up in the morning. This is fine; if someone misses a payment due to an error you’d expect this. But it’s automated.  It says that I need to hold to speak to a customer service representative.

So I hold.

And hold.

Finally, after being told that a customer service representative would be with me in “just a moment,” the system gives me a new recording: the phone number to call to speak to a customer representative.  Then it hangs up on me.

Huh?

You’d think that an automated system that calls customers and puts them on hold would have some kind of load balancing algorithm that would stop calling customers when all of the customer service representatives were already occupied!

Bible study spotlight: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (TSK in SwordSearcher) is probably one of the most important Bible study aids ever published. Many Bibles have cross-references in their margins, but these are typically anemic.  The TSK is like a Bible margin as wide as the Bible text column itself. I love this resource because it is all about interpreting Scripture with Scripture.  It does contain some commentary text, but that is limited, as the focus is on showing how words and phrases from each verse are used elsewhere in the Bible.

It’s part of SwordSearcher (shameless plug), but if you want a printed version, be sure to get the old (not newly revised) version. You might be able to find it at a bookstore, and it’s available used on Amazon for a few bucks. My Revell printing of the original TSK has ISBN number 0-8007-0324-3.