I recently had a Toshiba laptop that was no longer able to power on. I had always had trouble with the power connections on the machine and now it was no longer able to charge at all. I did not want to spend any money fixing it since it was old and out of warranty. The only problem was that I did need some of the data on the drive. I may post some of the issues that I had with this laptop, but that is for another story.

I had been working with VMware for a while at work and I figured I would give it a shot.

First, I bought a hard drive enclosure to house the drive. It was inexpensive and I needed to move the drive to the enclosure to get it imaged. The enclosure was nice to have since there wasn’t much space left on any other machines. I wouldn’t be using the image much anyway after getting what I needed, but who knows.

Next I created an image of the drive with Acronis True Image. This step was easy and didn’t take as long as I had expected. It created the “.tib” file and that was it. There is not much to that at all.

Once I had an image I converted it to a VM using VMware VCenter Converter. This is a really simple process and took just a few clicks.

Finally I was able to open it VMware workstation. It worked perfectly and I was able to recover all of my projects. If you ever have a similar problem give this a shot.

I usually do not write meme-related blog posts, but the New Year’s Resolution is an exception!

1. PowerPivot: I want to try to focus on PowerPivot and DAX this year.
2. PASS Healthcare VC: We’ve made some big strides in 2011 – we got it started! There is much more that can be done and we have some good ideas moving forward.
3. Certification: I would like to pass the 2008 (or really the 2012) BI certification tests. There is a lot of debate on the value of certifications, and even though I am not 100% certain where I stand I think it is better to have them than not. I’ve learned a lot studying for previous exams.
4. Blog more and become more active on Twitter: This is a goal every year and I never seem to have time. I’m going to make more of an effort this year. I’ll try for 2 posts per month.
5. Present at the local PASS chapter: I have not presented in a few years. I really enjoyed doing it, even though still I have a lot to learn. It is time to get back into it. I am going to target the second half of the year for this.

 

I was running a query today and was not able to SUM by the current month. I checked the code and didn’t see any issues there, but when I looked at the variables it was pretty obvious.

DECLARE @targetdate VARCHAR(8)
DECLARE @previousdate VARCHAR(8)
DECLARE @currentmonth INT
DECLARE @currentday INT

SET @targetdate = CONVERT(VARCHAR(8), GETDATE() – 1, 112)
SET @previousdate = CONVERT(VARCHAR(8), GETDATE() – 2, 112)
SET @currentmonth = ( 10 * CAST(DATEPART(Year, GETDATE() – 1) AS INT) ) + CAST(DATEPART(Month, GETDATE() – 1) AS INT)
SET @currentday = CAST(DATEPART(Day, GETDATE() – 1) AS INT)

Which results in:

20111018
20111017
20120
18

I was setting @currentmonth incorrectly. The correct value is:

SET @currentmonth = ( 100 * CAST(DATEPART(Year, GETDATE() – 1) AS INT) ) + CAST(DATEPART(Month, GETDATE() – 1) AS INT)

Which gives the correct date/month

20111018
20111017
201110
18

Big difference!