David's Weblog

I had the unfortunate experience of coming home to a server that would not boot.  For over 2 years this SSD has been working fine.  The screen simply read “MTR BOOTMGR is missing”.  I spent the weekend in forums researching the problem and tried quite a few different ideas, but could not overcome the fact that the boot sector on my Crucial m4 128GB is gone.   I bought the SSD back in Fed of 2010, so technically it is still within the 3 year manufacturer’s warranty.  In any case, here are a few things I tried:

1. The basic stuff.  Swapping SATA cables.  Swapping SATA ports.  Removing other devices as possible sources of problems by disconnecting them.  Going into BIOS setup and trying to detect the SSD.  It was undetectable by the BIOS.  I tried resetting the BIOS to defaults.
2. I tried connecting the SSD to several different SATA to USB converters and trying to access the SSD via another machine.  At one point I was able to get the other machine to see that there was a partition on the SSD, but I was not able to access it using Disk Manager in Windows 7.  Disk Manager locked up during several attempts.
3. I was finally able to use a trick  where you leave the SSD unconnected for 30 seconds.  With the computer off connect the power.  Start the computer.  Then connect the SATA connector.  Then hit the reset button.  After rebooting the BIOS was able to auto detect the SSD.  However, the boot failed with the same type of error–no boot partition found.

I am looking forward to hearing what Crucial has to say about the boot record on the drive.  Perhaps there is a trick I can use to get this SSD working again.

In any case, I am up and running on another SSD already.  It was a long weekend of software installations and Windows updates!

Lately, I’ve been playing with c# threading again and designing something to shut down my threads gracefully when the thread supervisor decides it’s time to shut one down.

I was reading Joseph Albahari’s site about safe cancellation, which is an excellent resource I often turn to. My focus is on the “Cancellation Tokens” section.

In my testing I noticed that the following

while (true)
{
    cancelationToken.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();
}

obviously needs try/catch blocks. After the supervisor calls the cancel() method the exception is thrown. At that point you can catch the exception and shut the thread down gracefully. Example:

/// <summary>
/// Test to see how the CancellationToken works…
/// </summary>
public void DoWork3()
{
    bool keepGoing = true;

    while (keepGoing)
    {
        try
        {
             mCancellationToken.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();
             Thread.Sleep(1000);
             log.Info(“Awake. Now going back to sleep”);
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            log.Info(“In the catch Exception block. Add your custom code to shut down things gracefully”);
            keepGoing = false;
        }
    }
    log.Info(“DoWork3 is done”);
}

static void Main(string[] args)
{
     CancellationTokenSource aCTS = new CancellationTokenSource();
     threadTest lThreadTest3 = new threadTest(aCTS.Token);
     System.Threading.Thread lThread3 = new System.Threading.Thread(new System.Threading.ThreadStart(lThreadTest3.DoWork3));

     lThread3.Start();

     Thread.Sleep(10000);

     aCTS.Cancel();

     lThread3.Join();
}

OK, so try/catch is a minor detail, but I prefer simple examples that actually work.

It’s rare that I’m asked to create document templates, but today was that day.  One problem that seems to always give me problems is creating section headings with numbers in a hierarchy such as the following:

1.

1.1

1.2

…

2.

2.1

2.2

…

Actually, creating the list is not a problem, but getting the list to use my Heading Styles can be quite frustrating.

After searching, I found that what you really need to do is create a Multilevel List and then tie the list to the Heading Styles.  A fine set of instructions is found here.  These are old instructions, but they also work in Word 2013.

Part of getting this to work was figuring out how to display the Multilevel List icon because it is not shown by default in the Home->Paragraph ribbon area.  So, I right clicked on the Ribbon and created a New Tab.  Then Selected “All Commands” in the Choose Commands from pulldown.  Finally, I found the “Multilevel List” icon in the list and added it to my New Tab.