Fixboot

I haven’t really laid my hand on a decent computer in years.

I’m still stuck with a Compaq Presario 5000 I bought in 2001. Despite a miniscule 40 GB disk space, I multiboot with GRUB to Suse 10.1 or Win XP.

Though slow, all was well till the BSOD appeared informing of a invalid boot partition in windows. My overloaded windows wouldn’t boot even in safe mode.

Lazily, I lived for a week on Linux. Then the day came when I needed Windows. As I could still see my Windows files when on Linux, I decided only to fix the boot sector. Used the fixboot command from the recovery CD to rewrite my windows boot sector.

I got lucky. The BSOD was gone. The data loss was zero. I happily multiboot again.

Fixboot can be a disk saver.

Fixboot writes a new partition boot sector to the system partition. The fixboot command is only available when you are using the Recovery Console. Usage : fixboot [drive]

Tasks, in Outlook

All right! Lets face it. I didn’t have time to blog.

If it weren’t for a Saturday night like this, I cant even be thinking of blogging – given the work load I have at office these days.

For all those who have many things to delegate and have a problem of what was delegated to who and when and if ever the delegated task was completed, there is Tasks in Microsoft Outlook.

After years of using outlook without even knowing about tasks, one day Kaarthik introduced me to tasks. Make a new task request to anybody and it will stay on your list forever till it gets completed. You can track by a single click of mouse all actions that are assigned to you, all actions you assigned to others, what is open, what is closed and do much more.

Can be pretty useful actually, only if more people knew about it.