Active Partition Switching: How I hate hardware (and love Microsoft Support)

Each night the partitions on my computer get backed up to an USB drive (drive O:\). When I connect the USB drive sometimes it remembers it is O: and sometimes it thinks it is F:. Kind of a pain in the neck, but I just hop into XP's Computer Manager and select the Disk Management, pick the disk and right-click to bring up a shortcut menu. I pick the Change Drive Letter and Path... option. I have done this hundreds of times.

Until last night when I accidentally picked Mark Partition as Active. This tells the hardware to make this drive the bootable drive. It did not even ask me if I was sure I wanted to hose up my hardware, it just switched it as if this is done everyday by users. What the heck?!?

So I poke around on the Web and every message I read usually ends with "dude, you are sooooo hosed." Ugh.

I called my hardware guy and tell him what I did. He went and did a little research and came back with the "Dude, you are so hosed..."

I HATE hardware.

In a desperate last resort kind of thinking I recall I have a four support incidents with Microsoft from my MSDN Universal Everything Suite System Subscription. So I take a shot. After all, I am already hosed so what could be worse? Thanks for asking. {g}

I want to let you know I had low expectations going in, but I am very happy to report Microsoft Tech Support fixed me up. Actually they inspected my machine and found out I was not hosed, but I did not know this until the very end. I literally could throw away the USB drive and the OS would have booted fine. But Surbhi downloaded a disk sector hex editor and made it so the USB drive was not the active partition. I was literal sweating as she was probing and hacking. Even though she was very reassuring all would be well I was naturally concerned. If I had rebooted with the USB drive it would have come up looking like I had no OS loaded, but she "hacked" sector 1 and made it so it was not active. Sweet.

So my first experience in years with Microsoft Tech Support was a pleasant and rewarding one. I also asked her at the end what happens when XP is no longer on the support list. She said it would be a long, long time before this happens. I kind of laughed when she said Vista was a baby operating system. I know she was referring to the "infancy" definition and not that it was inferior or smaller in some way. Getting premium tech support is a natural concern for businesses moving forward and not adopting the latest OS from any company.

So now you know how I wasted my morning and part of my afternoon. I HATE hardware. Almost drives a man to drink more than water and lemonade. {g}

Code References Tip of the Night

From the files of Captain Obvious: Code References does not search open files. I know, duh.

Tonight I was searching for all the places a table column is used in an application. I pulled out the always trusty Code References tool (one of the nicest tools Microsoft has included in the last couple of releases of Visual FoxPro in case you are still using VFP 7 or earlier) to perform the text search of all the files in the project. The search result list comes back with less than stellar results because it does not show any place where this column is used. I know it should be manipulated and even set as a ControlSource in one object in this form I have open, and yet the results show nothing. Argh. I have the form open!

The key to understanding what is going on is to pay attention to the Warnings/Errors details displayed in the pane at the bottom of the Code References window. This will list off all the problems the Code References' search came across when it was looking up the text you asked it to find. In this case the form I had open was not searched and this was the form with all the code to work with the column in question.

So the moral of this lesson is to always review the status at the bottom of Code References for the search you just performed. One more bonus tip, the warnings and errors are retained as long as you keep the search results. In my particular case I was able to close the Form Designer, click on the Code References Refresh button, and see the results I was expecting.