Topic: My harrowing ordeal

[idolminds]

Ok probably not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, but still.

Last night we had a bad storm pass through with lots of high winds. As usual I shut off my PC and went to do something else for a while until it passed. It did, I came back online. Started listening to a podcast, sat on IRC, blah blah.

Then the power went out.

Damn. I try to avoid it but it happens. Whatever, go play some more Crashmo and wait for it to come back. It did and it was late, but I figured I could have my PC download something while I slept. This is when things went wrong. I turn on the PC and hear a noise I never heard before, and it would not boot to Windows. It looked for a disc to boot from but I didn't have anything in the drive so it would error out. This was bad.

I opened up the case and the noise was coming from a hard drive. Oh fuck. Luckily it was my older, smaller hard drive that had nothing useful on it. I pulled it out and reboot. Still won't go. Well shit. Windows is installed to the still connected drive so what the hell? It was late and I had to be up early today so I just went to bed.

I wake up at 6 because A. the wind was windy and noisy waking me up anyway and B. maybe I can work on the PC before I have to go out. It wanted to boot from a disc so I threw the Windows disc in and let it go. I was relieved when the Windows installer saw the remaining hard drive but it didn't notice Windows was already on it. Sigh...whatever. Let's just do this and get me an operational system that I can work from, so I reinstall Windows. Then had to dig out all my driver discs. It was fun, let me tell you. Eventually I got it up and working, had my modem connect and a browser up so I could at least look for solutions. I was hoping to not have to start fresh because I think I'm missing installers for some things and it'd be a big pain in the ass to get them all again.

This new Windows sat in the WINDOWS.0 directory, while my original sat in just plain WINDOWS. Obviously it wouldn't let me simply rename them so I dug out an old Ubuntu disc and swapped the folder names there. It sorta worked but would hang on login. Damn. Switched them back. Tried to go into Windows recovery which saw the old install but wouldn't let me add it to the boot record. It gave an error that said run chkdsk, but chkdsk came back instantly with 0 errors? I was going nowhere.

Eventually I looked into boot.ini. It turns out this was my trouble all along. Boot.ini sits in the top drive directory and is where the system looks to tell it where the OS is? Something like that. So here is what happened. My OLD Windows install was originally on my 250GB drive. When I put my 1TB drive in I simply reinstalled Windows to it, set it as the default to boot, and then just deleted the old Windows directory on the old drive. This worked fine but apparently it was using boot.ini on the old drive, so when that drive died my system didn't know how to boot! Reinstalling Windows this morning recreated the file and I simply edited it to boot to my current Windows that has everything all nice and configured and installed already.

So yeah, that was my day.

Oh, that thing I had to go to this morning? I volunteer for the county conservation district and from August to November we collect seeds from native plants. This is useful for re-seeding prairies and other native lands around here and saves the district thousands of dollars a year. Anyway, today was the last day so we went and helped process the seeds and then had some pizza afterwards. Turns out they counted up the volunteer hours and my mom and I came in 2nd and 3rd for most total hours this season. I got a new hat!

[Cobra951]

I was sweating those winds and storms, but they never made it here.  The storms didn't anyway.  It was quite windy, but so far, no outage where I live.  I had a similar issue happen to me once when I dropped something right on the powerstrip's switch.  (What are the odds?)  I now use a battery backup.

My install is similarly screwed up too.  My boot drive and system drives are different (C: and D:).  If anything happens to either one of them, I have a mess to sort out.  That happened because I added XP as a dual boot to my (get this) Windows Me original system.  XP has been the default for years now, and last time I tried to boot Me out of curiosity, it couldn't do it.  Old fart system creaking along.

[Pugnate]

That sucks. I feel bad you are still on dial up.

Are you still on dial up?

These things are much easier to get through with faster internet. Once you've set up Windows, downloading software is smoother.

I am guessing there was a surge and it fried something...

[scottws]

That sucks, idol, but at least you were able to recover.

This sort of reminds me of a time when I decided to reformat my computer back when it was running Windows XP.  Remember when we used to reformat our computers just for the short-term speed boost?  I haven't done it in ages.

I had made a custom Windows XP install disc using nLite, in which I had slipstreamed in drivers for many of the devices connected to my computer, including my 3ware RAID controller.  So I booted to that media.  Windows Setup saw my RAID controller in the Windows installer.  I formatted my volume and then installed Windows.  Unfortunately, I got a BSOD during the installation process when it was trying to perform the driver installation section.  I tried a few times with the same result each time.  Crap!

So I booted to my original Windows XP RTM installation media (not the nLite-modified copy).  Unfortunately, it couldn't see my RAID volume because the installer didn't have my RAID controller driver on the disc.  If you remember, back before Vista you had to load drivers via floppy disk if you needed them during the Windows installation process.  I had a floppy drive on my computer, but I wasn't able to find the floppy disk my RAID controller came with that had the drivers.  I went onto my parents' Dell and found the drivers on 3ware's website and downloaded them to that computer.  Great!  One problem: the Dell didn't have a floppy drive, so I couldn't make a floppy disk on it.  Since the only computer in the house that had a floppy drive - mine - didn't have a functioning OS, I couldn't use that to make the floppy either.  Crap!

I checked the motherboard on the Dell.  It had a header for a floppy drive connector.  I took the floppy drive out of my computer and hooked it up to the Dell, but for some reason I couldn't get the Dell to boot with the floppy drive connected.  What was I to do now?

After thinking for a bit, I decided that I could try downloading an ISO for a Linux distribution on the Dell and then make a bootable CD on it and use that to install Linux on my non-working computer and then use the Linux OS to make the floppy disk.  So off I went to execute this.  I don't remember what distro I used, but its installer did see my 3ware RAID controller and volume and I was able to install Linux.

At that point, using the Dell, I copied the Windows 3ware RAID controller drivers to a USB drive, connected that drive to my computer running Linux, and then was able to make a Windows/DOS-compatible floppy disk in Linux containing the 3ware drivers.

I booted again to the Windows XP base installation media, pressed F6, and was able to load the 3ware drivers off of the floppy disk.  At that point I was able to proceed with and successfully complete the installation.  I was a little bummed though, because I had made that nLite media specifically so I could avoid having to spend all sorts of time manually installing drivers for all of my devices after the installation, but at least I now had a functioning OS.

So basically I spent some time installing Linux on my computer just so that I could copy some files to a floppy disk.

[idolminds]

Haha, yeah that sounds familiar. The disc I had of the newest Ubuntu was screwed up so I had to dig through my old burned discs and eventually found some netbook edition I could use. Worked ok considering I just had to rename a folder.

Yeah pug, still dial up. And that really is the problem. Just getting all the things redownloaded would be a huge pain in the ass.

[Pugnate]

What about 3G? Is there no 3G/4G coverage in your area either?

[idolminds]

There is and it could be useful for stuff like playing games online. But the caps are pretty low for the cost and based on what I download at the library when I go, I'd run into the cap in like 2 days.