Traditional methods of tracking specific runners were text messages sent to spectator’s cell phones as a runner passed over a timing mat. It was a free option for this race when I ran NYC in 2008, but now they are charging for this luxury. In conjunction with the text messaging option there is a mobile phone application that shows the runners location on the course. My guess is that when I cross a timing mat, the map should update itself with that position.

Last week the MCM race in Washington D.C. offered a similar mobile phone application, but judging from comments and the mobile application refund option made available on November 1st, that new technological advance did not fair too well.

Hopefully, the NYC mobile application will have a better outcome.

Part of the return process involves running a diagnostic program on the bad hard-drive. Per their website, 20% of returned drives are actually bad. It would have been helpful if I read that part before purchasing a replacement drive, transferring the data to it and spending an additional two hours formatting data off the bad drive. I could fall within the 80% of the perceived faulty drives that are actually good.

After performing tests on the drive in question, the program refers me to a second diagnostic DOS based-program which is bootable from either a 3.25″ floppy drive (who still uses those?) or a CD.

The second diagnostic program displays details about the drive, but the menu items remain disabled and the mouse and keyboard stop working. That’s a small problem.

Arriving at a dead end, I include the test code from the first program in the hard-drive exchange request. They’ll send me a re-certified (refurbished) drive once they receive the bad one. I’ll use the replacement as a back-up drive. More on that later.

The replacement hard drive arrives in the mail. It’s warm as it has been baking on my front doorstep for several hours. After spending an hour getting past the POST 21 error messages, it’s time to copy the contents of the failing hard-drive to the good one.

I know one of the commercial programs that does the job is Norton Ghost; however, there is a free software program called G4L (Ghost for Linux) that will also get the job done. Presumably ghosting means to duplicate. After creating a bootable CD image of the program, I plugged in the bad hard-drive and its replacement and started the computer up.

You’re presented with a text-based menu system. I choose option 1 which requires typing g4l and pressing enter.

At the main menu there is a raw drive copy mode.

Within this mode there is an Click ‘n Clone option to perform a drive to drive transfer.

Unfortunately it’s not apparent which drive has my data on it. It would be a very bad thing to copy the contents of a blank drive and to my failing hard drive. That would overwrite all of my personal data.

Fortunately there is a toggle partitions option that will shed more light on the drive details. In hind-sight I should have enabled the power off option from this menu.

The source/target drive options now show more details about each hard drive. I see that block device (hard drive) sda has two Windows (NTFS) partitions on it and device sdb is the blank drive. So in my situation device sda is the source drive and sdb is the target.

After some confirmation/warning screens, the cloning process commences. Cloning one terabyte of data is an over-night job.

I wake up the next morning, unplug the failing hard-drive and remove the G4L CD. Windows starts right up with all of my personal data and programs intact.

Pulling out the video card to reseat two memory sticks, I mutter, “I wish I had a Mac” as I wouldn’t be dealing with this crap. I quickly dismiss the thought as Macs are computers with training wheels (e.g., they just work) and resume trying to fix this new problem.

I must have nudged something as I pulled out the cables from the bad hard drive, introducing another POST error.

After the computer starts up, it automatically shuts down and powers up a second time. An LED display on the Intel motherboard displays the number 21 and beeps three times. The error is memory related as I encountered the same program earlier this year after transporting the computer from Orlando. I figured that the ride might have of bumped the memory out of place.

[ Video showing the problem (23 sec) ]

The following actions corrected the problem when I first experienced it a few months ago:

1. Pull up a small white latch on the PCI-Express video slot.
2. Remove the video card.
3. Remove the two sticks of memory, after pulling back the pair of white levers that hold each memory stick in place.
4. Vacuum the inside of the computer, taking care not to suck up anything.
5. Insert the two sticks of memory into the blue memory banks, closing the white levers on each stick.
6. Insert the video car into the PCI-Express video slot.
7. Push down the small white latch on the PCI-Express video slot.

If you omit step 1, part of the latch will break when attempting to force out the video card.

This time around, I omit step 4.

Sometime later, I shine a flashlight into the case computer case and see a small hair resting over the top side of the video card and the over-sized computer heat sink. I remove it with a pair of tweezers, and the computer starts up without a problem.

Update 1 – The problem happened again. Tried flashing the BIOS to a new version. I have a feeling that I’ll have to RMA the motherboard.

An abbreviation for Hard Disk Drive.

The computer screen glows to life with a task bar at the bottom of the desktop and a dialog message.  I must have left the computer on all day again.  You can’t tell because it’s just as quiet on as it is off.  As the monitor comes to full brightness, I can make out the message better.  It reads something to the effect of that I should immediately back up all of my data because the hard drive is going bad.

I turn the computer off, wait a few seconds and power it back on.  After the computer POSTs with a solid single beep, a text message is displayed.  The white text tells me that my hard drive is going bad and that I should turn the computer off.  I press enter to load the operating system and everything looks fine.

Shutdown and restart.  The same warning message appears.

When I purchased this particular hard disk drive, the half the customers complained that their hard drives went bad in about 3 – 6 months.  Do you know what?  They were right.