Oh Buggery Fcuk.

03:30.42 - Saturday 23rd October 2004   (Link to This Entry)

I finished downloading a HEEEUUUUGE archive late last night and decided to copy the individual files over to the desktop machine, only partway through, the laptop drive started chugging and very little in the way of copying was going on. After dozing off, waking up an hour later and realising that the exact same file still hadn't finished copying, I was forced to restart the laptop forcefully to try and save my harddrive.

Only it didn't work like that - my HD is corrupted so badly that I can't even get into Windows in Safe Mode. This is an NTFS-formatted drive as well you understand, which is specifically designed to guard against such catastrophic crashes. Currently I have CHKDSK going over the drive from the recovery console (booted from CD) but I'm not holding out much hope. If my site isn't updated for a few days, you know why.

While typing this on the desktop I've fired up eBay and I'm going to order myself a 2.5-3.5in HD adapter, which will at least allow me to put the drive into the working desktop machine and do something with it, even if it's just a case of pulling as much off it as I can and reformatting the bleeder.

Well it's Progress

09:38.25 - Saturday 23rd October 2004   (Link to This Entry)

I can at least boot without a BSoD now, but it's taken half an hour so far. Hopefully I will be able to sort it once I get into Windows.

Edit: After sitting here looking at the ''Applying security policy'' box for the best part of an hour I've restarted (again!) and gone for Safe Mode with Networking. It seems to have booted a lot more quickly and I might actually be able to get at the files over the network, which would help.

Sadly the C: drive isn't shared, so I'm not going to be able to pull my email off this way, but at least I can get at all my work. I think I'm going to have to do without the laptop this weekend and wait until I get the adapter, so I can back the whole drive up to the 80GB Maxtor I bought for someone else.

Oh looky here - it's frozen at the ''Applying security update'' screen again. How wonderful.
I don't think I'm going to get much sleep this weekend.

Crippled

20:50.43 - Saturday 23rd October 2004   (Link to This Entry)

That's how I feel - I've spent all today without my usual computer setup and I can't find anything to do. Until the HD adapter arrives, all I can do is mooch around the Internet using IE to check my email via mail2web and re-read the same few sites over and over again. I can't be bothered to suss out all the URLs of my favourite sites, so I've been pretty quiet on the web front.

So what're other people up to? Booday received his Sagem MXY-7 from Woolworths and sent me the number, but hasn't actually managed to get the supplied credit onto the phone thanks to the abortion of a site that is O₂. I sent him a text message anyway because you never know, right? Plus it's not like I had anything else to do.

Mr.Foo has finally gone insane and programmed a PIC chip (remember those? we used to 'do' Playstations with them) to output to TV. 2K of program memory and 38 bytes of variable space was not enough to put him off, apparently. Mental I tell you.