More This 'n That from Oldest Living Blogger...

Yesterday, I settled a dispute over a parking violation at a parking area in a back alley behind my doctor's clinic here in North Vancouver. There's a row of parking stalls there, never enough for the traffic, and part of it is reserved 24/7 for the dental clinic beside the doctor's clinic. There's probably a story there too but this isn't it. 

I'd had an appointment at that clinic that day, and was unable to get into the correct part of the parking, because it was all full, so rather than miss the appointment, I parked in the dental clinic's "reserved 24/7" section. As I left the appointment walking back to my car, I passed a beady-eyed individual in the alley, skulking along, noting license numbers with a pad and pen. I got to my car before he did, and drove off down the alley. That was a month and a half ago. This past weekend, I get an overdue notice in the mail demanding $110.25 for a parking violation I didn't know I'd been tagged for.

I sent them an email complete with several pictures of the location taken by Google's Street View, and suggested this was a rather harsh introduction to their venerable company, and it would be much nicer if we could just start over with the original violation fee. This I sent to their Appeals email address (these guys have it all figured out) and a nice little gal named Alice Wong agreed that
we should start once again from the beginning. I was tempted to ask her if two Wongs make a Wight, but thought better of it.  All's well that ends well.

And while struggling to avoid an ulcer while desperately trying everything to get this nice computer going again after that BIOS disaster, I've been wondering how many other perfectly-useful computers have ended up in the junk because people insist on believing that just because you screw up the BIOS it means you have to throw it away and buy a new one. 

IF you're willing to spend the time hunting the web for answers, and of course have another functioning computer to use for that, there are answers out there.
Even if you haven't got access to Windows, it can still be done because the universal language of BIOS systems  seems to be DOS - either FreeDOS or the MS-DOS variety. And you can find an instruction which tells you how to get a 
USB flash drive programmed as a bootable DOS drive, with which you can get
your correct BIOS installed over the bad one. And then all you have to do is coax Windows into re-installing itself. During which, you may have to use the good old DOS Command Prompt, to enter a couple of commands that make it do some self-diagnostics and repairs to get itself into the right condition to accept a re-installation of its Operating System. "Like what?" you ask.....

Like the following, so you may want to make notes here:-

In Command Prompt, at the flashing cursor, type in:-
Bootrec /fixmbr
(This gets it to restore the Master Boot Record)

Or else try.....
Bootrec /fixboot

And if you can't boot into Windows 7 any more, try this fix:-
Bootsect /nt60 all
And if "all" doesn't get the right response, try substituting your drive "C:"

It worked for me....

 Update: This just in from Alice Wong:


 

Thank you for your correspondence.  We have received the $63.00 payment on  June 19 2013 and your account has been updated. Please disregard the notice you have received in the mail.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Have a nice day !

Regards,

Alice Wong