I am wondering what Microsoft Internet Relay Chat is. Someone told me that that's what mIRC means. But that can't be true, mIRC isn't a Microsoft product, is it? And otherwise, what does the m in mIRC stand for?

microsoft has nothing to do with mIRC and nobody really knows what the M stands for

Microsoft Chat was an IRC client for Win 95/98, NT 4.0 and as far as I know hasn't been updated since.

i've always assumed the M just stands for Mardam-Bey

There are a number of threads relating to what the 'm' stands for. There is no official answer, although Khaled's FAQ says it could be 'MU' which is the Chinese idiom for 'nothing', heh.

Regards,

In the heat of the "Mirc-opens-new-pages-in-IE-And-not-my-default-browser" scandal there was wild specualtion that Khaled had sold out to Microsoft. A lot of speculation, Both Microsoft and KMB declined to comment on the issue.

Though this would account for the increase in security problems in subsequent versions. Hmm...

Just like everything else Microshaft has "absorbed" .. had mIRC been sold to them it would now be names MSirc .. never happen!

mirc would be crap if microsoft owned it. Khaled does a much better job

lol, what an ignorant comment.

For all you know, ms does own it, just because ms owns something doesn't mean it will be bad.

- Faced with the very real possibility of losing 2 years of work because of Windows XP's massive inadequacies I'm inclined to disagree.

OK so maybe that's not entirely true, but nonetheless the idea that mIRC is owned by Microsoft is ridiculous. It couldn't go unnoticed, nor would it make sense for them to do it. Even having to make the point that it's ridiculous is ridiculous, it should go without saying.

*cough* XP has a fully functional backup/restore feature for a reason, one would most likely use backups if it was anything important (as is always recommended).



I totally agree with that, although I'm not a member of the Microsoft FanClub , Microsoft make alot of very "high tech" and innovative products, most of them are terribly expensive, often buggy, but then what programs arent.

Look at how many bugs have been reported in mIRC over the years, and its only a small program compaired to something like Windows XP, which is off the scale

In any event, One massive hint that Microsoft does not own mIRC in addition to the fact theres no 'By Microsoft' label would simply be that all registration fees for mIRC go directly to charity, and Microsoft would never do such a thing.

Eamonn.

You mean System Restore? Yeah, what a nice program. Except Microsoft forgot to add one minor feature to it: The ability to restore the system. Honestly I don't know what the hell System Restore supposedly restores, but it certainly isn't restoring key system files necessary for making XP not crash on startup in normal mode or within seconds in safe mode. ChkDsk, aka Fckdsk, manages to 'fix' the corrupted NTFS volume by deleting vast amounts of files automatically when it decides the indexes are incorrect - then once it's done cleansing the file system (of most of my files that is) XP loads and re-corrupts it again. I guess I could always boot using 'Use last working configuration' except for the fact that it considers BSOD on startup as a 'working configuration'. As it stands I'm probably gonna have to buy a new HDD, install XP on it, boot from that, then hope there's enough of a filesystem (and files) left to access and retrieve info off the other drive as a slave. Then I'll burn it all to CD and shift everything over to the first non-Windows OS I come across.

As for not having backups; I had the crazy notion that XP was stable and that running a system with no outside sources of software (ie. no possibiility of malware of any kind) from a non-administrative account would be sufficient to not completely [censored] the system. One random crash later and colour me surprised. Actually I do have backups of some stuff, but it's completely disorganised and out of date since I had to shift it all onto about a dozen CDs (we're talking about GBs of data here) about 6 months ago.

Edit: I'm not trying to create a big MS-bashing thread here, I'm just seriously pissed about the situation and I had to get it off my chest somewhere.

If you've got an original legit XP CD shove that in and go from there. It'll repair your XP for you.

XP is by far more superior than other OS's when dealing with system recovery.

I don't wanna appear to be advertising anything (I hate spam), but have you considered SpinRite 6? It's designed for this kind of data recovery/hard disk repair situation.

- The only thing I can find to do with recovery options from the CD is Recovery Console, however I'm extremely reluctant to try that seeing as the Microsoft website states 'Before using Recovery Console, it is recommended that you back up your information on a tape drive, because your local hard disks might be reformatted—thus erased—as part of the recovery.', once again highlighting the fact that Microsoft don't seem to make a distinction between recovering data and removing data.


- It comes with a whole lot of stuff which claims to recover systems, however I've yet to see any of it actually work.

Hopefully it won't come to that. I think the filesystem is still intact enough that it should be readable.

There should be an option to go to the recovery console, or to reinstall windows. Go the latter and it should detect an old Windows installation, which then has an option to repair. I did this about 1.5 years ago and it worked fine. The only things that broke were programs (like MS Office) and such that required files that were removed (registry keys and such as well). But all the data was left in tact.

If the above fails somehow, I recommend you download (or get somehow) the Knoppix CD. It's a CD-bootable Linux OS (if you didn't know) which will detect all your windows partitions and allow you to make backups through it.

I wasn't aware that Knoppix could read and write NTFS volumes. I'll probably give that a try.

Afaik, Linux cannot yet write to NTFS, but it *can* read NTFS. Whether or not Knoppix will do this "out of the box", I don't know...

Apparently NTFS write support is experimental, nevertheless I should only need to read the drive so it probably won't be an issue.

I used it to read data on my NTFS XP machine, and my school NTFS 2k machine "out of the box". So I guess it works fine.

Just curous, how many HDDs are you running on the system that is "fubar" (a lack of better terms)? I'm excluding partions to be clear, but physical HDDs.

Just one. I've been looking to get at least one other drive for backup purposes for around 6 months but haven't due to major lack of cash. I'm always paranoid about backing up data ever since I lost two HDDs within a year to hardware failure, the trouble is CDs just aren't practical for the volume of data.

Anyway, Knoppix is working, so in around 14 more CD transfers I'll be able to reformat and start over! ...Then I get to shift it all back across again...

there are experiments with new NTFS drivers for *nix/*bsd systems but none of them is working without problems :-P

at the moment you can only read NTFS drives with another OS then NT

Ummm well I have FreeBSD 4.10 running fine with NTSF so I dont know what your talking about

Well I finally finished backing it all up. I decided to run Recovery Console anyway and one FIXMBR later it was all up and running, making the last two days completely redundant . Oh well, at least I've now got a decent backup for next time.