So I shut my computer down yesterday evening… morning… one of them… to give my cpu and other components a nice big rest before I put them through an animation and video editing workout for the next few days to get my Tropfest film ready for submission…
And so I go to turn on my computer when I wake up at around 1 pm and… lo behold…
[b]It hangs on the Windows XP loading screen.[/b]
Well, that sucks. It’s somewhat expected as for some reason, Windows does this to me every few months… so I go to Safe Mode and while I know that nothing has changed in software in regards to new installations since it last shut down, I’ve gotta take it through the steps to see what’s happening.
[b]And then Safe Mode stops working on me.[/b]
Well yeah… that’s nice. A Happy New Year to you to, you fucking piece of shit Windows installation.
So I go to reinstall Windows, but for some reason, all of the Action Pack Windows installation discs are missing. I don’t know where they are, and neither does Dad (which probably means they’re lost beneath the countless paper, software, and hardware littering our dining and living rooms on places that we’re supposed to be eating off of) so I have to use the backups… which are SO OLD that they can’t even recognise a disc beyond 130-150gb or so… and as a result, they can’t read my installation.
Well, fuck me.
Seriously, I am so annoyed that I could do with a blow job right about now. Or at least some heavy petting.
So for me, every single option seems to indicate that either my drives are dead (which is bullshit) or my newly planned setup of Windows for the day wants to format one of my discs.
Seriously… fuck this. I can’t take any risks. I go out and buy a Seagate (uuggghhh) 320gb SATA2 drive with 16mb cache for $150.
Evil, I know but I need my computer up so I can finish this animation among other things.
So I go home (after a look through in Westfield) and procede to set up my new hard disk. On the Antec P180 case, this means pulling out the lower hard disk bay, pulling out the middle hard disk bay so you can get out the screws, and then screwing the hard disk in, and then connecting the wires through each of the compartments the P180 has for temperature and air regulation.
A bitch, yes… but it’s a bloody good case and I certainly can’t complain about it.
So I begin to setup Windows and yet.. DAMN… what do you know, it won’t make a partition bigger than around 120-130gb.
I start asking Dad where the discs are, but he doesn’t know. And then I find our MSDN discs. They’re underneath a bunch of crap near a system he recently had to reinstall himself.
Now this disc is good… except it doesn’t take my Action Pack key. For those that care, Microsoft… you truly suck. You have a program — an operating system — that requires a registration key and yet when you have one, it might also not be compatible with the same operating system manufactured at an earlier date. It’s the same bloody application… it should have the same bloody key generation engineering behind it!
Nevertheless, I’ve found this MSDN installer and I unplug the remaining drives so as not to accidentally format any of them and I get to reinstalling.
I do have to give some credit where it’s due: Microsoft did make an excellent and easy to use installer for XP once you’ve moved away from the whole evil command-line styled design complete with that ASR function that doesn’t have enough bloody documentation available on it (Stubbsy has linked me to a useful piece of information tonight which I can probably use next time, but shame on you Microsoft for not telling people what the ASR actually does).
So, Windows is reinstalled… now to figure out if all my data is intact:
One drive is fine. Two drives are fine. Three drives are fine. Fourth drive is… wait… what? Windows wants me to “initialise” it so it can attempt to reformat it? Well fuck that. I’ve got data on that drive I need to keep.
So the first software I install on my newly created installation of Windows XP isn’t Firefox or Opera or even Winamp or CA E-Trust AntiVirus… but none other than a file recovery application! Yeah! That’s the spirit of computing! Data integrity and recovery! Thank you, beloved computing experience, for putting my faith in spending hours and hours rebuilding something that had nothing wrong with it!
I feel like I’ve walked into a doctor’s office with a papercut and they’re now telling me that instead of slapping a band-aid on it, they’re going to treat it with every known anti-inflammatory and alcoholic cleanser, bandage it up, then amputate my finger for good measure and reattach a cybernetic finger just because they can!
It’s that bloody irritating getting your data back the way you want it to.
Luckily, the data recovery software is good enough on one of my “Windows-thinks-I-should-format” partitions to restore most of the directory structure. I’m still going through it’s “Lost Files” directory seeing if there’s anything I need to keep, but I think I’ve taken care of most of it and now feel like I’m wandering through past deleted files.
However, the other partition on that evil drive has completely lost its directory structure and probably because its formatting structure.
How? I have no idea. It was healthy but I’m beginning to wonder if this was more an electrical spike or a hardware failure rather than a Windows error.
Still, I’m not going to apologise to Microsoft within this ranting blog entry because even with a possible spike creating problems for my hard disk, the hard drive in question WAS NOT the one with Windows installed on it and it shouldn’t have been affected in regards to the installation of Windows being corrupt.
So, since the other partition had lost its directory structure, the file recovery program is now restoring all of the files (which in this case were mp3’s) to my current and new evil and loud C Seagate drive where I’ll run them through an application to rename them from their file-structure-lost names back to what their ID3 tags think they should be called.
Thank Bob for ID3 tags. Phew.
So, anyway… that’s today.
I’m still going through the files and I’m waiting for the rest of the drive to be restored onto my new drive.
I will say that Seagate drive I just bought has me a bit concerned. For a new drive, it’s got a louder sound when its accessed to any of my other drives that I own. Seagate’s have always been nothing but crap in my past experience with them and at this point, it was a must have because it’s all ZipLinkComputers. If I had easy transport out to ITEstate, I’d have grabbed a WD… but meh.
I also need a job too now more than ever since I’ve had to move money from my ING Savings account since I’m heading to low dollar counts.
Being freelance is evil in that way, especially when after interview after interview, people won’t hire you because you’re either “too experienced” or “not experienced enough”.
I mean fuck… anyone complaining that I as a 23 year old has too much experience for a job really needs to think about what they’re saying. How can I have too much experience for a techie job? Wouldn’t that just make me better at it than the next guy?
[b][i]*sigh*[/i][/b]
I’ll write another entry when this is closer to done.
I’ll probably have less blog entries than normal again this upcoming week so I can get the bloody Tropfest flick done.