Windows 7 recovery and MBA fixing

I am unlucky! My laptop's hard driver is damaged when I tried to re-run assessment in my windows 7 and cancel it after I heard terrible strange noise coming out from my laptop. Probably, the hard drive has not been physically damaged. However, I can not read the data from this seagate 2.5" driver after i put it in an external USB or eSATA enclosure.

Anyway, I replaced a new 2.5" hard driver for my laptop. Before I restore Windows 7 system to the laptop, I installed Fedora on it to see if its motherboard has no problem. However, after doing this, Windows restore DVD (created by Gateway backup) can not recognize the right size of new hard driver. It always shows 0 size. Then, I do the following steps to restore the Windows 7,

1) put the hard driver into a external closure and connect to another Visa machine.

2) Using the Disk Management tool from Computer Management to format the new hard driver.

3) Put back the new hard driver and restore Windows 7 on the laptop.

4) However, the system can not been boot up yet. I have to continue work.

5) download and make a Windows 7 64 bit Recovery CD and run the below command to fix the MBA. Particularly, I have to add option "f" to successfully reset MBA.

bootsect.exe /nt60} C: /force] /mbr 

Did MySQL for IBM i5/OS platform die?

On Zend Forum, there is a hot discussion about MySQL announce EOL support for MySQL on IBM i. This is the link to Zend forum post. This is MySQL EOL announce. However, after reading those discussion, I feel some of them are worrying something which they do not need to worry about.

I think the EOL support only means that there will be newer version of MySQL for IBM i platform. It does not mean developer can not use existing latest version of MySQL on IBM i. The only thing missed  is that you can not BUY support from MySQL because they do not supply this service. However, will this be big issue? I do not think it is going to big problem because many people want to use MySQL because it is FREE. I think I will be happy with MySQL as long as its features are enough for my application and it is in a product quality.

So, I would like to ask people, who worry about the EOL support for MySQL on IBM i, to think about one thing. What do they want, always upgrading to latest version of MySQL or using one stable version to build their own product? Obviously, most of people's target is the second one: build their own application on top of free MySQL RDBMS. Therefore, I would like to say MySQL does not have its EOL on IBM i. Developers can still use it as long as they are satisfied with its quality and features.

I am interesting in MySQL on IBM i is because I am looking for a way to walk around the DB2 Connect license fee issue. To remotely connect to a IBM i DB2, developer need to buy DB2 Connect license from IBM if they are not using free type 4 JDBC library like jt400. Therefore, I am thinking that let PHP script to remotely connect to MySQL server with DB2i storage engine might be a good way to walk around this license issue. With this solution, PHP can write and read data which is stored in DB2. And the data can be subsequently accessed from DB2 side like RPG programm. But, the limitation will be that developer can only write stored procedure in MySQL and this stored procedure can be remotely accessed by PHP through MySQL interface.