Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Macons finished
A slight delay posting because our computer failed. The maçons left on Tuesday morning after pouring the concrete floor for the new kitchen. That's the new breeze block part on the left hand side. The rest is up to us, apart from the carpenter and roofer for the two new lucarnes. The breeze block parts will have a cream coloured enduit (lime based render) applied once the windows are fitted. It's a very typical finish on the exterior of French houses. The gites look a bit grey at the moment but once the windows and doors are fitted, Caroline finishes the pointing, the enduit is applied and a few wall plants grow it will look very different.
Caroline and I went to Rennes on Tuesday morning whilst the maçons finished up to order the new windows and doors. In France all the windows open inwards, unlike in the UK where they open outwards. In France it is much easier to clean or paint any windows because you have easy access to the outside without climbing up a ladder. You do lose your window sill as a storage item, but I think it's a small price to pay. Consequently the windows and doors are fitted differently. They are just mastic'ed and screwed to the inside of the wall rather than between the walls. It gives you a bit of room to manoeuvre.
| 8:25:24 PM
Macons finished
We had a frustrating Tuesday/Wednesday because the PC packed up. Windows 2000 started OK but took about 5 minutes displaying the 'Windows is starting..." dialog, then 10 minutes displaying 'Preparing network connections...", etc. After about 30 minutes we tried to log on but it displayed the message "The system cannot log you on now because the domain <pc name> is not available". Which is very weird cos it's a standalone PC and has never been in a domain. It also did it in Safe Mode! Microsoft article Q244671 had a fix for the problem, (corrupted 128bit encryption files) but it didn't work. A search on Google showed that quite a few other people had exactly the same problem without a fix.
In the end I had to install Windows again in a separate directory so I could copy all my data from the NTFS volume. I then restored an image backup of the whole system disk I took about a month ago using Norton Ghost zapping the disk, and then copied back my data. A real pain.
Firstly Windows shouldn't fail this easily. I've installed nothing in the last month or fiddled about. It just died.
Secondly, why is my data scattered all over the hard drive. It makes performing backups very difficult and time consuming.
When I was in IT we used to recommend that people not only took regular backups, but also regularly tested the restoration procedures. I take (regular?) backups, but have to admit this is the first time I've tested the restoration procedure. Fortunately it worked.
Note to myself - more backups.
| 8:22:08 PM
