BurbleChaz

My spiffy new computer has been showing signs of a hardware problem recently. The windows partition has been bluescreening at boot with increasing frequency. It has reached the stage where booting fails more often than it succeeds. It looks like a trivial disk error affecting the XP bootloader. The Linux partition was unaffected.

So, I took a backup. If you can read this, the restore has succeeded.

Then, I started goofing with some low-level utilities to see if the disks were OK. Since they seemed to be, I let Windows have a go at fixing the problem. This is probably the fourth time I have trusted a Windows utility to do anything more important than set the clock. I remember why, now. The utility starts, and says 'Rewrite Master Boot Record?'. The only option is OK. Rather than hard-crash the machine there, my booze-addled brain sends a 'click' signal to my fingers. Whoops.

On the plus side, the rewritten boot record seems to load XP reliably now. On the down side, my Ubuntu partition was completely inaccessible. Hey, ho - another 650MB download.

I'm now at a position where I can start putting the whole thing back together. In three or four hours time, I'll be exactly where I started. Isn't progress wonderful?

In other news: No lack of ram, so we ate rack of lamb (I am so very, very, sorry for that). I can still cook an awesome cheese sauce. Also, personal best on the full Lysterfield Loop - 66 minutes.

Why not go and look at some pictures?