Burnt Norton

[robinturner]

In my end is my beginning ...

For some reason best known to Mr. Gates, my Windows setup stopped playing games. This is rather bad, since I don't normally use Windows for anything else. I reinstalled my video card and DirectX drivers to no avail, so I thought, "Of well, it was about time to reformat and reinstall anyway." Then a friend suggested I try Norton Utilities, so I installed that and ran it. Sure enough, it found lots of errors and fixed them, optimised my drive and so on, but no 3D games would run. "Not to mind," I thought, and booted back into Linux ... not. Kernel panic. No boot image. No partition. Booted from CD ... not. Booted from floppy ... not. Went into command line rescue mode and reinstalled my partition table ... not.

This left me rather peeved. A reinstall of Linux only takes about an hour, and I'd backed up most important data fairly recently, largely to my Windows partition, ironically. But there were all these programs I'd painstakingly downloaded. I mean big programs. Open Office. KDE 3.0.

Now for the fun bit. The hard disk is so screwed, sorry, I mean "optimised" that the Linux installer can't make head or tail of it - it just keeps saying "bad magic". This means that to reinstall Linux, I have to wipe the entire hard disk. This means that to save my data, I have to FTP all of it to my office computer over a 56K modem. I am currently doing that. Looks like it's going to be a long night.

In my beginning is my end.

Comments

[solri.livejournal.com]

OK, 3.30 a.m. and I've uploaded the last of my backup files. That was the one which had all my wife's data on it, and was thus named saveyourass.zip. Now it's time to format that hard disk.