Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Multiple Points of Failure
Ugh. Not one but two machine at home got KO-ed over the weekend. Worst part is that it seems as though all of my emails since the beginning of January are lost. Still don't have email access at home as a result, though that is not as bad as having lost a copy of all of my past emails.

I bought an Epson scanner (a Perfection 2480) on Friday to replace my old HP one that was starting to show signs of being irretrievably flakey. I started installing the software on Sunday morning, and was puzzled at how long it took for its "Smart Panel" program to load, which after about half-an-hour I decided to kill. Somehow the damned thing managed to clobber the contents of my Documents and Settings folder in Windows, taking with it all of my desktop and program settings, along with a good chunk of My Documents. Those it didn't clobber, like my program files, it ended up copying with it into its "Smart Panel" directory. Obviously not so smart… It took the better part of the afternoon sorting the worst of the mess out. Luckily I have backups of almost all of the files and folders in the My Documents directory, stored on a separate machine, but did not have my Outlook.pst file backed up. Even went and bought a copy of Symantec's Go Back program to see if I could retrieve some deleted files, but the Outlook email files are completely gone. At least I'll have that program for future use, but now I have to send emails out to all of my students from my PHP/MySQL class and get them to resubmit all of their assignments.

The other problem is my notebook computer, which not refuses to load Windows, citing a System Error problem with the lsass.exe file, which is likely either due to "bit rot" on the hard drive sector that holds this vital start-up file, or it's a nasty case of the Sasser worm. Tried doing a repair by going into Windows XP Console mode, but it keeps prompting me for a password that I've never set, and I can't find any way around it. Will have to go back to my Linux skills (or more likely, ask someone at work to help me) and try to get Knoppix up and running via the DVD drive and see if I can locate and recover my files prior to doing a re-formatting of the machine.

Like I said before, ugh...