My windows box ate itself today. Apparently there’s a bug in SP2 that makes it hang on “agp440.sys” or something like that when booting. even in safe mode. When I popped in the windows cd to repair it, it went all “mad cow disease” on my hard drive and destroyed a huge number of random files. Anyone that’s seen what mad cow disease does to the poor things’ brains knows what I’m talking about. This is including the entire “my pictures” directory. Took out a large portion of my documents and software storage places too. more rambling and the solution under the cut.
Funny thing about windows and the way it “protects” the user directories…. I reinstalled windows (XP Pro) from scratch on a spare 4-gig hard drive with the intent to add my old main drives on later and get all the files. It refused to let me into the “iggdawg” directory under the Documents and Settings folder. I remember having this issue once before with transfering user files. So to get around it, I yanked the whole hard drive cage and rigged it up on my FreeBSD box. I booted it up, su’d to root, and mounted the drives. At this point I was pretty fucking psyched because I’ve never mounted whole hard drives from a different file system before. just floppys or CDs. I go to the documents and settings folder, and waltz right into my directory, handing NTFS a big root-sized middle finger as I entered a place I know it didn’t want me to be. that’s where I saw all the damage. I copied what I could to another drive and wrote the rest off.
It turned out that my new “end table” server saved my ass a little. I had established a RAID-5 array and dumped a ton of stuff on it just to play with FTP. I retrieved a good amount of stuff from the array, but not even close to “all” of it. sucks to loose that much stuff. lots of history in those files.
bah. fucking windows. I don’t even know if I’m going to reinstall it. I might just put freebsd on the machine I had windows running on. the only reason I even had windows there was that I’m a game whore. I think consoles can tide me over for a while.
This SP2?: http://www.livejournal.com/users/kateprice/35322.html
Sorry – couldn’t help it 🙂 I back up everything of value a couple times a week since I’m forced to work on Windows and I’m constantly running processes that it doesn’t seem to like which cause it to hang. It’s even got glitches such as when you use the scroll button and try to scroll sideways in some programs it self destructs. I swear it gets glitchier with every release.
The ironing is double-delicious. Not only do I remember that post of yours (and it did come to mind as I was trying to repair the install), but I was going to reply to it when you wrote it… I had a good sized post written out with my opinions on some of the newest “undocumented features”. But Explorer crashed right after I got done writing it, and I was too ::grumble:: to re-write it all.
I have so much data I’d consider “important” that I’ve always been reluctant to back it up due to sheer volume… Optical media just wouldn’t cut it. I’m getting a tape drive soon, but apparently not soon enough =/.
and yes, this counts as an “I told ya so” situation =P
booo to restricted weblinks
Booo! I can’t see it. 🙁
Re: booo to restricted weblinks
Nothing exciting. Just me being an asshat by pointing out a link I made a month ago ordering people with common sense to not install SP2 because it is evil. We tested it where I work and it ate several machines.
Re: booo to restricted weblinks
Oh, I see. I was tempted to download that on my new PC, but was afraid of something happening… I had heard concern about the new upgrade. Glad I haven’t tried it yet.
well Nooby Nooberton that’s what you get for going sp2. you should know never to fix things that ain’t broken. 🙂
my machine is running fine and its install was about 1.5 yrs ago iirc.
windows is always broken
mine isn’t 🙂
different strokes my friend…