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One of my clients has been having a lot of trouble with his office PC, and I spent pretty much all of yesterday trying to get data off it before it gives up completely. I’m still not sure what prompted the coollapse in the first place - it might have been malicious software, or it might have been just a hard drive failure.

The symptoms were twofold. First, Windows (in this case Windows 2000 SP2) would fail to boot most times, giving a blue-screen and complaining about a variety of missing system files and dlls. On the odd occasion that it would boot all the way to the login screen, it simply would not recpgnize any of the user/password pairs that usually work on that machine. Without any login at all, most rescue attempts are stumped.

In this case, the machine had an extra hard drive installed (supposedly for backups :-) ). I installed another copy of the OS on that drive, which would allow a login, and rescued the bulk of my clients files. The biggest problem was with stored email. My client prefers to use “incredimail” for his email needs. Incredimail is well-known for the vice-like grip it keeps on its data, refusing to store it in an accessible form, and requiring an “export” operation to even move email to a new machine or upgraded OS. That can be a problem when the old incredimail installation won’t run from the new OS drive. I spent quite a while trying different approaches until I found IncrediConvert.

IncrediConvert is a really neat third-party tool that delves into Incredimail’s weird file structure and extracts all the messages as more-portable “.eml” files. It preserves the stored folder structure and is a real lifesaver if you have a dead incredimail installation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do so good a job with the incredimail address book, but at least that’s almost plain text.

Has all this got anything to do with podcasting? Indirectly, yes. My client has recently been collecting audio interviews and thoughts on his new Olympus DM-10 Digital Voice Recorder and Music Player. I love this device. I’ve not had much to do with portable voice recorders for a few years, and this new crop of digital machines are smooth and easy to use for recording, and simply appear as a removable drive containing pre-built MP3 files when plopped in to a little USB cradle. The usability of a purpose-built voice recorder is so much better than the MP3 players with recording ability that I’ve seen. I can’t justify getting one at the moment, but it sure is tempting.

Anyway, all his hard-won audio content was also stuck on the inaccessible PC, so that’s all got to be fetched off too. I’m hoping to get my client set up with a RSS podcast feed for some of this material soon, but in the meanwhile you can hear one of his very first recordings on the new machine on his web site (look for the image of a microphone and “a word from the coach", near the bottom of the page).