I found out (the hard way) about this particular problem with NTFS Mount points today:

When you try to delete folders that are stored on a mounted drive and to send them to the Recycle Bin, you may receive the following error message:

Cannot delete Foldername: Access is denied. The source file may be in use.

This behavior occurs because the Recycle Bin does not understand mounted volumes.

This was really freaking annoying. What makes it even worse is that there is no “fix” for the problem; only a workaround is available. And the workaround?

When you delete the files or folders by using Windows Explorer, use the SHIFT+DELETE key combination. This bypasses the Recycle Bin.

Riiiiiiiiight. Because bypassing the Recycle Bin is exactly what I want to do WHEN IT’S MY ENTIRE USER PROFILE FOLDER THAT IS ON A MOUNTED DRIVE!

Now I’m really pissed off, because I no longer have the capability to try and go back to the configuration I originally planned to use with the new drive (copy partition & resize to new drive) - this is because I’ve already mounted the new drive and formatted it. Changing this now would involve a lot of copying data around and resizing of partitions, without being able to have a “backup” in place as before - a risk I’m not willing to take.

I may have to put on my Windows Hacker Hat for this one and figure out how to either:

1. Make the Windows Recycle Bin understand Mounted drives, or;
2. Make Windows automatically bypass the Recycle Bin for Mounted drives.

Because remembering to SHIFT+DEL every time I want to delete a folder from anywhere in my user profile directory (including but not limited to: My Documents, My Music, My Videos, My Pictures, etc.) is just not OK. Never mind what it’s going to do to programs that try to delete things - I can just see all the error messages now!

If anyone from Microsoft is reading this - especially anyone from the shell/explorer team - please, please, please bump this bug up in priority - I’m begging you!!

If you’ve been a reader of my blog for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed I lean rather heavily towards the libertarian end of the political spectrum (not really a spectrum, per se, more of a 2-D grid, but I digress…). So it should come as no surprise to you that I was quite happy this morning when I stumbled upon the blog (yes, blog) of recent presidential hopeful Bob Bar, who is trying out for the Libertarian party. (As an aside, his blog runs WordPress and has comments enabled - a rare thing for a candidate!)

I guess I just can’t help myself - I get really happy when I read things like this:

“I want to end the artificial control of the economy and end burdensome taxation; take a hard look at cutting cabinet positions; reduce the cost of the occupation of Iraq by beginning the process of removing the security blanket from the Iraqi regime . . . return respect for habeas corpus; reinstate the rule of law; stop the warrantless surveillance of American citizens; and remedy the abuses of the Patriot Act. . . .”

If you’ve felt at all disillusioned with the existing two parties recently, try spreading the word about the Libertarian party. Encourage people to stop “voting for the lesser of two evils” and actually cast a vote that means something and that might actually change things, instead of just keeping the status quo around here. And even if (like me) you vote Libertarian just on principle, remember - a principled vote is never a wasted vote.

Political candidates from the two main parties often go on about how “it’s time for a change” and then they like to tell you how they’re going to do it - but really, the candidates don’t have the power to change anything. We the people are the ones with the power to change things. We the people are the ones who can take a stand against corruption and abuse and all the things that are wrong with our government today. So c’mon people - let’s make a change. Vote Libertarian!

So, my new 500 GB hard drive arrived the other day. Thus began the 3-part geek tragedy that accompanies any computer upgrade.

First off, let me say that it’s been a while since I’ve done this. The last time I installed a new hard drive in my computer, Ultra DMA was still pretty new - and every hard drive tended to ship with an IDE ribbon cable, just in case.

My first lesson was that this is no longer the case - or at least, it’s not the case with SATA drives, which is of course what my computer uses now. So, when I hunkered down Friday night to install my hard drive, I quickly hit the impasse of “no cable.” Silly me!

To be fair though, I must compliment modern PC designers - or maybe just Dell. This was the simplest hard drive install I’ve ever done. Say what you will about Dell (or mass-produced PCs in general), but they do have some good points. I just slipped out the plastic drive tray, popped the drive in, and slid it back into place. No tools needed. Sweet!

The next day, I hopped over to the nearest store where I could confirm that they had an SATA cable - which turned out to be Radio Shack. Of course they charged $10 for what should’ve been a $3 cable - but of course it was all shiny and colored and probably meant for more of the “case mod” crowd than people like me, but whatever. I got a really good deal on the hard drive to begin with, so I didn’t mind spending a few dollars more for the cable.

The First Signs of Trouble

I snapped the cable into place easily (I’m really liking SATA, BTW) and the drive came online easily. Now I just needed to boot from my GParted LiveCD and copy my partitions onto the new drive, resize them to take advantage of the new space, and I’d be done. Although the resizing would take a while, it should be pretty simple - just set it up, let it run, read a book while it churns, and come back when it’s done. How hard could it be?

The answer, it turns out, is really hard. GParted (or more specifically, NTFSResize) kept saying that I had “bad sectors” on my drive, and because of this it refused to touch my main NTFS windows partition. Ugh.

So, following the advice of the tool, I rebooted and ran CHKDSK… and it found nothing. I booted to the Windows Recovery Console (following advice found online) and ran CHKDSK from there… and it found nothing. I booted into the “utility partition” that came with my Dell and ran the HDD diagnostic tools there - they all said the drive was A-OK. I rebooted, tried GParted again - no luck, it STILL insisted that there were bad sectors. I even ran Seagate’s own “SeaTools” disk diagnostic program - on both drives, with each scan taking several hours - and both drives “passed” the tests, no errors detected. But still, I couldn’t use GParted because NTFSResize kept saying there were bad sectors.

By this point, it was Saturday night and I was getting impatient. “OK,” I said, “screw you, GParted - I’ll just use some other tool to copy the partition, and then resize.” Oh ho ho ho ho, how naive I was to think that I could get away with this!

Trying to Outwit Fate

I used a disk cloning tool to make a copy of my hard drive on the new drive. Naturally, since the new drive was bigger, it didn’t use up all the available space after the copy. I figured that since the new drive was, well, new, it wouldn’t have bad sectors and once the data was copied I’d be able to resize the partitions easily.

This, of course, was not the case.

8 hours later and the copy was complete. I fire up GParted and… NTFSResize stubbornly refused to resize my partition, even though I had made a complete copy a new disk. It still said I had bad sectors.

At this point, I was beginning to wonder exactly how NTFSResize detected these bad sectors. It took over an hour for CHKDSK to do a complete scan, how was NTFSResize, which booted up in just a few seconds, detecting these bad sectors? And did the disk clone really copy the bad sectors as well, or just some partition table information that labeled certain sectors as “bad?”

The Compromise

By this point it was late Sunday afternoon, and my weekend of spare time was quickly running out. So I decided to compromise by using option 2 from my original post - the feature of NTFS “junction” points. It wasn’t ideal, but it would work - mostly.

I booted into Safe Mode and logged in under my seldom-used Administrator account. From there, I copied my entire user profile directory to a temporary location so I had an empty directory to junction with (for obvious reasons, you can only junction to an empty directory).

While I was at this stage, I thought “perhaps 500 GB just for my personal user profile is a bit much - surely I can junction another large folder and split the space into two partitions, perhaps 250 GB for my user profile and 250 GB for, say, “Program Files?” Well, no, actually, you can’t do that, as it turns out. Windows won’t let you rename the Program Files folder (even in Safe Mode), so you can’t use that trick to junction it to a different partition.

This wasn’t a huge setback - my user profile takes up some 60% of the space on my drive, what with movies & music & other such things - but while not ideal, it would work.

So after waiting an hour or so for the new partition to format, I had it linked to my user profile directory. Now to just copy my data back into the folder - which is now a “hard link” to a partition on a different drive.

A few hours later (hey, it’s a lot of data!) and my profile had been moved to the new junction - effectively, the new drive. I rebooted and everything came up A-OK.

Now, my user profile directory (all of it, not just the “My Documents” folder mind you) is actually located on a physically different hard drive (although it could have been any other partition).

As you can see (click the image for the full-sized picture), my user-profile folder “Keith” even has a distinct icon to show that it is linked to a different hard drive.

What was once a rather cramped 144 GB drive is now 79% free space - plenty of room for growth (new programs, Windows updates, etc.). And my bulky user profile, with its massive music & movie collections, now has plenty of room to grow on that new partition (named “HAL” for personal historical reasons - before Windows introduced the “My Documents” folder, I used to keep documents in a folder called “HAL”).

Those other FAT and FAT32 partitions, in case you are curious, are the utility partitions for Dell - where it has the “recovery & diagnostic tools.” They don’t take up too much space, so I leave them around - and they may come in handy someday.

Conclusion

I would have much preferred to be able to do what I originally set out to do. I’ve used GParted before, and I’ve had nothing but good experiences prior to this. The new drive is (presumably) slightly faster than my old one (bigger cache), and I would have liked to have that slight speed advantage for some of my, you know, programs, or maybe even for Windows itself.

I still wonder what those “bad sectors” were. I suspect that they may have been found long ago, and CHKDSK found them and dutifully marked them as “bad” after recovering data from them. They certainly don’t cause me any trouble - my computer is (knock on wood) quite reliable. Why NTFSResize refused to run is beyond me - perhaps being a little too paranoid about data integrity? And why there isn’t an option to just ignore the errors and continue I’ll never know - these are Linux-based programs, after all. Isn’t that kind of power/option the whole spirit of Linux? (I suppose I could have downloaded the source code to NTFSResize and re-compiled it myself to do what I wanted, but seriously, who has the time?)

I’m not knocking GParted - it’s still my favorite tool for this kind of work. But it was rather frustrating - it did, after all, eat up my entire weekend.

What do you think - was I just unlucky, or is this common when resizing NTFS partitions?

I’m getting the itch to change my blog theme again. But I’m having trouble finding anything I like.

I have a number of themes installed, and they are all very good, but none of them is quite what I’m looking for. For example, I have PhotoSky and Dignity from ThemeBox.org, GlossyBlue by N.Design Studio,  GreenWave from the Romow Web Directory, TerraFirma by Sadish Bala - and of course, RedWave (the current theme I’m using) from AskGraphics.

Other than not using themes that have a black background and white text (too harsh on my eyes), I’m pretty open - though of course it’s personal taste.

So… anyone have any suggestions?

This great article goes into great detail how the current surveillance society came to be, and looks at the historical origins of the entire process - and the debate that continues to this day. It is as enlightening as it is well-written.

No one should believe that real-time government surveillance of the communications network is an idea born of the 9/11 attacks or that it results solely from the Bush administration’s aggrandizing of executive power. The legal arguments that the government has asserted to support increased surveillance of digital space were first put forth in 1994, under a Democratic president, and they had little to do with the threat of Islamic extremism.

All the more reason to continue to fight for our own privacy rights at every turn - because by its very nature, Government (with a capital G) will scoop up every last bit of privacy you have if you don’t defend them. And before you know it, you’ll feel… well, a picture speaks louder than words:

“1984 was NOT supposed to be an instruction manual.”

No, it was not - but it seems like we’re following it as if it were.