Holiday System Failures

Last week, I noted in an article comments how my Windows Home Server blew up right before Thanksgiving… literally.

With that in mind, I returned to my office this morning to back up my main workstation using Vista Complete PC backup. The backup hung. So, not giving up, I went to install Acronis True Image 2009 (my preferred backup tool when not using a backup server). Installation failed. Oh, and on the reboot, my user profile data doesn’t load.

This brings me to one of my biggest complaints about Vista… the inevitable corrupted user profile problem. It seems that every Vista install I have used, has wound up needing to be formatted and reinstalled. The problem surfaces where the user profile fails to load, and the default profile is loaded on reboot. Naturally, one runs chkdsk to fix this. And, that works… until the next reboot, where it corrupts all over again.

So much for self-repairing NTFS file systems… I now have a backup server that is probably fried throughly, and now my workstation PC is too unstable to do anything but pull the hard drive out to rescue the data (on the less-than-off chance that either Vista or the drive itself is failing).

Anyways, what was the point of this post? Well, with two systems down in the office, I’m calling off plans for the Cyber Monday launch of our latest MechaWorks web site. I’m re-setting the launch date to some time next week. We really wanted to get this site off the ground on Cyber Monday… and it will make a lot of sense why when you see it.

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