Back!

So, for the last four days or so I have been off of my computer. The technical explanation is that the master boot record of my hard drive was corrupted. The not-quite-as-technical explanation is that my computer was unable to figure out how to load the operating system (aka Windows). I was ultimately unable to get it working again and had to spend basically $63 to buy a new hard drive.

How did this happen? Well, as you most likely know, I do some reviews on my primary blog Shadows In Motion. My last serveral reviews have actually been a journal, of sorts, that I kept as I attempted to get various distributions of Linux to run. None of them would run correctly, but my last review really fudged up. To make matters worse, it was a commercial distribution of Linux that the company agreed to give me for free so that I could give it proper review.

I was excited about this turn of events. It’s awesome to get an email from a company that says (paraphrasing), “Hey I’d like to send you the full commercial version for review”. My reaction was, “Hell yeah!”.

It turns out though that the product, Linspire, has a long standing bug in the area of code that allows you to choose which operating system to choose when you turn on your computer. It’s supposed to allow you to run both Windows as well as Linspire, and you just select which one you want your computer to boot to. For the not-so-technical of my readers, this is a fairly common practice referred to as dual booting.

This dual booting program goes into an area of the hard drive called the MBR, or Master Boot Record. When your computer is turned on it reads that area to know what operating system to load. Generally this is windows.

This bug in Linspire hit my computer pretty hard, though. Be it a fluke or just another side effect of the bug, it corrupted my hard drive’s MBR. Ouch! Suddenly I was seeing “error loading operating system” when I turned on my computer.

It turns out that the floppy drive (3.5″ sized drive) on my computer is so old that it wouldn’t read the boot disk that I made. I could not access my system at all. Of course, the Windows install CD was of no help, either (technical: fixmbr and fixboot didn’t fix the problem and I couldn’t access DOS to run fdisk /mbr).

So this left me with two options: Spend a little money for a 3.5″ sized drive so that I could use a bootable ‘floppy’, and hope that the “fdisk /mbr” command worked, or, buy a new hard drive. There was no gurantee that the boot disk approach would even fix my problem, so I spent $63 on a new hard drive. $63 that I really can not afford to spend on something like this, but suddenly had no real choice!

It’s possible that it’s extremely unlikely that anyone else who uses Linspire will encounter this bug, let alone have their drive’s MBR corrupted. Nevertheless, I did, and I’m not too bloody happy about it. That’s a lot of money to have to spend out to get my system going again; money that could have been better spent.

Now I’m short a chunk of dough, went nearly a week without my computer operational (note: should get a cheap trash system for testing stuff), and I have to call Microsoft to activate Windows because of their “screw the consumers’ rights” copy protection.

It just goes on and on.. I am not a happy camper.  In fact, I’m through with Linux.  Not touching it again unless someone sends me a completely prebuilt, preinstalled system for free (and pays for the shipping).  That isn’t likely to happen.
~Mysk