Recovering a Business Contact Manager database

The biggest headache I've had this week has been trying to restore my BCM database to my desktop. I hadn't backed it up recently, but the .mdf and .ldf files for it were recovered from my old disk drive. I thought it would be easy enough, but I was wrong.

Just trying to replace a new BCM database on the desktop with the old files didn't work. I tried so many things, including changing my login name to match my old computer. Then changing my computer name to match the old computer. Nothing was working.

Finally, I followed directions I found here for restoring the database, and after messing around with file permissions for what seemed like ages, I finally got the script to work without giving me an Error 5 Access Denied message. But then it still wasn't showing up in Outlook when I tried to configure BCM. Eventually I read something about starting Outlook as an Administrator, and then the database showed up! I selected it and there was all my data. So far so good. But when I tried to share the database for access from another computer where my niece does contact entry for me, it wouldn't work. It just gave me an error about how it couldn't complete the last action.

Finally, I found a post where someone said it was a problem with permissions on Vista, and that the directions in the link above work for XP. My other computer has XP, so I tried it there. Lo and behold, it worked the first time. I was excited. That worked for me as long as I could share it with the desktop. So I went to Share Database from the BCM menu. And was promptly told that I could not share the database from Windows XP Home Edition. I had forgotten it was Home Edition. I briefly looked into upgrading to XP Pro.

Then I had a flash of insight. Since it was working for local access on the XP, I performed a backup of the database. Then I restored the database on the desktop. Success! Then I shared the database on the desktop with the username I use to login from my other computer. Then I went to the other computer and selected the shared database.

It only took the better part of 4 days.

Computer Crash

My 18 month old HP Pavillion dv9500 died on Monday. I came back to the office and the screensaver looked like this. I could access the ctrl-alt-delete menu, but when I tried to launch Task Manager or to reboot, it just returned to this screen, with maybe another black rectangle somewhere. I have not been able to boot up since. Not even in safe mode. Check disk reported error #10009 and said Replace disk. Eventually, we couldn't even get into the BIOS so something is seriously wrong

Thom, acting as my IT manager has been up late several nights investigating. He thinks I have a video problem, as well as a hard disk problem. Or it could be the mother board. If it is the mother board, repairing it could be 1/2 as much as buying a comparable new Sony Vaio. This is my first HP and I'm not planning to buy another. The built in video camera hasn't worked in at least 8 months and many hours trying to trouble-shoot that were wasted.

In the meantime, I've been trying to get up and running on my Dell desktop that I bought last year for testing. Fortunately I had checked all my source code into source control before the computer crashed. And we have a USB 2.0 to IDE cable that we were able to use to hook up the 2 hard drives from the HP to the Dell. The data is all there, so I didn't lose anything, other than all my time in dealing with the crashed laptop.