If you'd care to, send me your addie

bamage02[at]yahoodotcom

so I can drop you the occassional line.

Sorry, GG, for turning this into the "personals" section...

I listened to Michael Reagan while stuck in traffic yesterday, and you should have heard the neanderthals talking about how nice it would be for Ahmedenijad to have an 'accident' <*wink-wink-chuckle-chuckle*> while he was here. Other more-or-less sober (and I'm not sure which) people suggested that we let him in and then lock him up.... <*sheesh*> Eedjits.

Cheers,

Ahmadinejad @ ground zero

Of course you let him visit. and if you're smart, you ask any of the 9/11 families to guide him, if they wish. and you invite any other leaders to join in, if they wish.

It's a no-brainer, and a great opportunity.

but instead, they play it the worst possible way they can. These guys are totally--totally--totally inept in foreign policy and statecraft.

No, it's not ineptness. It's a personality disorder. The only type of "diplomacy" they can manage is a "in-your-face"/"FY". It's not like they considered the options, and reflected on it and decided that their approach was best. It's just a reptilian brain(stem) at work. See, e.g., Sh**ter....

Cheers,

Coops!

You meant, Poops?

You meant, Flops?

You saying Um are Big Flops at the bottom?

'Um are Flops in politico's moo-cow stalls!

Quacks flops!

Did I say office?

I meant to say that Leiberman can share a stall with Sen, Craig, not an office.

why the Democrats don't at least make them work for their fillibuster.

In the good old days, fillibusters were schemes that took days and days to perform. While they were going on, there was furious armtwisting going on on the floor and in the cloakroom in an attempt to get enough folks to change their vote to actually break the fillibuster.

Nowadays, all someone has to do is threaten a filibuster, get one vote to verify that there are not enough votes at that time to break it and the Senate capitulates to the minority.

Harry, make them work for their fillibusters.

Next, when a bill comes to you from this administration, like the current FISA Amnesty deal, let it sit on the shelf while the GOP is fillibustering and don't schedule it for the floor until it's as ripe as a 6 month-old melon (or one of Shooter's comments here). IOW, make them pay for their obstructionism.

When you're done with that, tell Leiberman to find a smaller office and staff because he no longer has any committee assignments out of your office and won't need a large office and staff.

Maybe he could share an office with Sen. Craig.

They never do the negative by half. Currently projections suggest we'll see 153 threatened fillibusters this session. Not genuine ones where they have to put their mouth's to work, just threatened ones.

The most we've seen from any session since the 1960s was 58 in the 106th session (I think). Quite an accomplishment on their part.

Pity that'll be their only claim to fame.

Of course you let him visit. and if you're smart, you ask any of the 9/11 families to guide him, if they wish. and you invite any other leaders to join in, if they wish.

It's a no-brainer, and a great opportunity.

but instead, they play it the worst possible way they can. These guys are totally--totally--totally inept in foreign policy and statecraft.

And Hillary is right there with them. Let's see what the other candidates say. Let's see if any of them have a clue. This is a very interesting little test for them.

Okay, but just to ease my conscience, stay on this thread when Glenn moves on.

No problem. I've only had a few hours of sleep and I'm fighting a damn sinus infection, but I'll be here until at least 1:00pm EST before I have to drop off to take care of a few things.

The program has the drivers, because of what it needs to do to access drives, it locks up all the USB resources, and the mouse and keyboard freeze -- it isn't expecting to have the whole system run out of USB.

Sounds like this "cloning" program didn't come with the computer, otherwise it would know and account for how the hardware is being accessed - ie via USB connections.

If I don't load the USB drivers, the program works (because then the BIOS mounts the keys and mouse), but it doesn't see the drive onto which the clone is to be built. It doesn't do SATA data (says so in the manual), but can see SATA drives (through the interrupt).

I'm not sure what is meant by the BIOS mounting the KB and mouse. Most BIOS functions are done via interrupt driven control, since they are backwards compatible with the original IBM standard. That's how DOS based systems accessed the various typical devices attached to a computer. It was known as "direct hardware access" and is why you were able to write to a drive no matter what. Windows changes all that by more or less overriding the BIOS and instead using its own drivers, locking the drive and preventing direct access to the hardware.

As for your comments on the SATA aspects of the system you noted that "it doesn't see the drive" but then you finish up with "but can see SATA drives" which is a little bit of a contradiction. I'm going to take a guess and say it's possible that the software sees the drive but can't access it due to either a size of the drive issue (DOS usually can't access drives that exceed a certain rigid partition size, based on the number of cylinders and heads) or due to the format that's on the drive. DOS systems can work with FAT, FAT16, and FAT32 (usually) but typically can't access partitions formatted with NTFS (native to first Windows NT, then 2000/XP, and now Vista) or other formats native to their respective operating-systems.

I'm waiting for their tech support to tell me he's seen this configuration before, but everybody seems to be surprised that the familiar stuff isn't there somewhere.

Honestly, it does sound like a very strange arrangement, but that doesn't really mean anything beyond we're all spoiled and expecting to see the typical hardware/software configurations.

While you are waiting to hear from a tech can you give me a few pieces of basic information?

~ Does it run Windows? If so, what flavor - ie DOS based like 95/98/ME or NT based like NT/2K/XP?

~ Can you post the make and model info of the box so I can do a little research and reading up on it?

Lastly, there are some wonderful bootable CDs out on the net. Like:

~ HiRens Boot CD

~ The Ultimate Boot CD

These might allow for accessing the system and running some diagnostics and possibly even cloning programs that will allow you to get a sector-by-sector copy of the drive for safe keeping.

There are also other win32 based disks/apps that use a stripped down version of Windows XP but I don't think those will work since you now can't access the drive with what I'm assuming is windows.

HTH