I recently deleted the partition on an external USB Drive. I have always been cautious when I install Operating Systems. But this time I accidentally left my backup USB hard drive (1TB !) plugged in when I tried reinstalling Windows XP on one of my old desktop. I was I have only one hard drive but 2 partitions showed up during the installation. And I wasn't thinking when I deleted both of them. But moments after I deleted both of my partitions - 1) My internal hard drive partition and 2)My external USB drive partition I had the "ah hah" moment!!! Yes I realized before I did format my drives so I immediately quit the setup.

Then I tried plugging in my hard drive into another XP machine which said it was an unformatted drive and asked me whether I want to format. Luckily I said "No" and when the logical place anyone would go to find a solution. You guessed it right - Google. Thanks to Google, I had to spend the next few minutes searching for different options. I tried using dskprobe.exe from Windows Support Tools but not much luck - it is a low level tool even though it is GUI based tool. Then I tried Partition Magic - which didn't give me the option to undelete the partition I deleted. I have heard stories about people paying thousands of $$$ for disk recovery. Some the information on that 1TB external USB drive are not very important but my pictures and other backups are very important for me. So I continued to stay in "Panic Mode" for few more minutes until I found a forum thread discussing about TestDisk - which is an OpenSource software (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk).

The tools is a command-line based tool but very helpful and has detailed documentation that helped me. It took sometime as I had to search for the partition through the entire 1TB space. But that tool couldn't find the partition. The tool extrapolated the boot sector as the boot sector was not present my hard drive and also the back up boot sector was not present. Finally I am able to access my files on that 1TB hard drive now. Lesson learned - Always take extra care when you install and uninstall software!!! And think thrice before you delete anything!!!

Really after a long time!

I didn't write in my personal blog for a very long time because I was busy with my other blogs and technical blogs. In the mean time my studies are also keeping me busy. And I managed to act in a small role with a movie. My company got bought out by another company so getting my way around the new place etc.

You can read my other blogs

My blog on WebLogic Server - my bread and butter - http://weblogicserver.blogspot.com/

My blog about a movie that I acted - http://aathemovie.blogspot.com/

By now you should know that an interesting reality is that not only people who work with computers day-to-day are blogging but also some interesting folks. Here are couple of other blogs that I came across during my stay away from my blog. These blogs are written by some powerful folks and influenced me a lot.

Blog from a tamil movie director Ram who directed the movie "Katrathu Tamil" -
http://directorram.blogspot.com

Blog from the director who I worked with in my first movie (as if I have acted in many movie ;-) ), Arun Vaidyanathan about his first baby (movie) - http://www.arunhere.com/aathemovie/

Inspiration has a very different meaning than what we all know - the drawing of air into the lungs. Right now I am inspired by many people and that is driving me. The above two are a few people who inspired me. Hope to share more with you guys in this tiny little space of this ever growing cyberspace.

Here I am !

I know many of you are very curious to see me or associate a face to my blabberings ((*&@#!). So here I am. Thats me!

After a long break...

I am here updating my blog after a very long time... yeah more than an year! Part of the reason being that I am doing my Masters in BU now. I joined my first course during March 2006 and now I've successfully completed two courses.

One of my friend wrote a comment to one of my previous topic about my higher studies that - if you put something in writing you will do it. That is so very true. I got a oppurtunity to do an online course which well suits my current job that involves a lot of travel.

I hope to come back here with more exiting news both academic and non-academic in the futue. Until then see y'all.

View from the top of Empire State Building overlooking Jersey and uptown Manhattan 

Here is a view from the top of Empire State Building. You can see the Chrysler building, Metlife building and Manhattan Bridge. 

New York City, New York

New York mean different things to different people. Actually New York is the name of the state in which the City of New York or New York City is located. For some reason I never got bored of looking @ New York City[NYC] at all. Every time I see the sky line of NYC I cherish like a little kid looking at a fair ground. Yes, thats what it is. There is something interesting for everyone in this city like a fair. And this city is always lit like a fair and never sleeps.

I think the people in either side of Manhattan are more lucky than the people who live in the city. Coz' they can keep seeing the skyline whenever they want. I like the views while I am driving on Brooklyn Queen Expressway [BQE], Liberty State Park[NJ], approaching Lincoln Tunnel, approaching Manhattan through any bridge [Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge etc.] etc. I heard people say a picture can speak more than 1000 words. So here are some pictures I took with my ordinary digital camera.







I have many pictures taken from the Top of the world . Oops, I meant to say top fo the world trade center. I have to dig those pictures. But here are few taken from the top of Empire State Building which is now the tallest building in NYC. The main differences between seeing the city from the top of these building are:

• From Empire State building you are not exactly at the terrese you have still have few floor on top of the observatory where as WTC observatory was the actual terrese.
• You can see night view from Empire State building which is lot better than seeing from WTC

Higher Studies

It was always been a dream for me while I was in college to persue some higher studies. But all that dreams were busted when I was halfway through my Under Graduation in Engineering. I felt how hard it is to even get through my semester subjects. How am I going to study more and more and more.... if studying a subject is this hard! But sometimes we feel that our lectures are responsible for our subjecto-mania. Those are the times when we sit and study for our final exams, we called that era as Study Holidays. The complex subjects will be tamed by our buddies and will be preached to us as a gist rather than hours and hours of boring lecture. After we went through such a cycle of boring lectures - fear of semester exams - productive study holidays - daunting exam days - enjoyable holidays - Ok results, we decided not to worry too much during the term and enjoy as much as we could. So that the secret of our enjoyable college days.

Our terms are 6 months (we call'em as semester) and we will be forced to take some (6) theory courses and some (2) practical courses. The system I studied gave 2 electives during the final year of our college but that too we all in the class have to agree upon some electives and more than anything there should be some lectures who can teach that courses. So it was technically electives but not though. So having gone through such a forced learning system for 4 years I was daunted to go through them again.

Being a moderate student my dreams about higher studies were deteriorating when I reached the finaly semester of my college studies. Also my sharp classmates (paruppus) scared me with the corridor talks about GATE, MBA etc. So I finally made up my mind not to pledge for "No Higher Studies". So I compromised for postponement - I will start working for a while after my graduation and will think about presuing some higher studies (I was not sure what I wanted to do then) after a while.

Many friends, philosophers and guides volunteered a set of advice to me - "Once you start earning you will never think about persuing any higher studies", "If you see some money in your hands you always want more, it will be hard to leave your job for anything" etc.
But it all said the same moral to me - "Do it now or never". I tuned myself to be deaf enough to avoid what everyone said.

To support my decision I was recruited by a firm during the campus interview. Campus interviews are ritual in Indian colleges. You college is considered good, bad or better depending on the number and standard of companies that visit to recruit outgoing students. We always envy other colleges around us as we are not used the campus interview rituals. But we were told that our super super super seniors had such rituals. But our batch tried their ass off to bring some companies to our college for recruiting and there were sucessful too. So long story short I took my campus job with mechanical engineering firm and put my dreams about my higher studies in a pigeonhole.

After I took my job and started to earn some money(good for my bread and butter) we started to discuss how we can achieve this higher studies without all the pain that was daunting us. Some friends were generous enough to give some advice about persuing the higher studies in foreign country especially USA. They said that the education system in USA is so flexible that you can pick you subjects and you can even pick you own professors. I was so excited about the fact that I can pick my own lecturers/professors. So I further postponed my dream of higher studies. I decided that I will reach USA and will start my higher studies.

I can keep continuing what happend after then and now. But I want to do that on another post. So here I am 8 years after completing my under graduation living in USA still haven't persued my dream. I am living in USA for almost 7 years. But things changed a lot in the course that I forced myself to be away from my dream for a while. But I sure will persue my dream at some point of time. Also little bit of personal information about me if you are wondering where this guy is from and where did he go to school. I was born and brought up in India and I went to Mookambigai College of Engineering, Keeranur, Tamil Nadu, India for my Under Graduation in Engineering. :-)