December 10, 2008
I think I Forgot to Mention...
...That I think -- fingers crossed -- I've managed to completely repair my system here at Lizard Central.
At least, it's worked fine for the last couple of days.
<neep alert>I had disk images for each of my drives sitting on an external terabyte USB drive... but the problem was I couldn't get my system to boot (after the fiasco where the fatheads at Microsoft tech support "suggested" I simply buy another full copy of Windows XP and install it on a different partition -- inadvertently neglecting to mention that this would mean I'd have to reinstall all of my applications; that is, all 126 of them, about 100 of which are sans disks that I could find (though each and every one is legally purchased).)
It took me more than a week to undo that insanity and get a system that would actually boot... but only using my Norton Rescue Disk. Eventually, I bought a new 500 Gb IDE drive, plugged it into my original motherboard -- I now know how to replace the motherboard without causing Windows to fall into a hysterical fugue, but I'm not sure that new Windows installation disk will cooperate -- booted off the Norton disk, and was able to restore, one by one, each of the drives to a corresponding partition on the new drive. The boot drive and the Windows drive each had problems, but I judged them not serious enough to prevent booting; and once booted, I would be able to repair the drives.
It all finally worked, and I spent all day Monday running every repair application I had, from Norton Disk Doctor to Norton WinDoctor to Pest Patrol, to a couple of antivirus programs, to Registry First Aid 7.0 -- which I had to run five separate times to clean up all 3,347 registry errors lurking in the Windows-drive disk image I restored.
Anyway, it all seems to work now, knock wooden nickles.</neep>
So the last few posts here were created on my original, comfortable, happy, Windows system, instead of on Sachi's wretched Macinslosh toy computer. And I was only able to do so once I got the brilliant idea of completely ignoring all of the advice I was getting from endless armies of help-desk professionals from Bangalore named Noor or Singh or Mohammed, and simply following my own instincts and logical, Spockian analysis of what to do and how to do it.
There must be a patriotic lesson buried in there somewhere.
Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 10, 2008, at the time of 1:31 AM
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