Sunday, 22nd May 2005
Laptop crash
Today evening when i got home, my fingers were a little extra itchy and i was on my laptop (as usual) when i installed (by mistake) the worst kind of spyware possible. The fact that it came hidden as a video of an infamous actress and from a not so trustworthy torrent site is all i can offer as defense to the question of 'why did you ever install it ?'
Well anyways since it was the end of the semester and i had meant to do a clean wipe and re-format of my laptop and put up a fresh XP Pro install, i thought it wasnt a bad time to do what i had been meaning to do from the day when we had to install Oracle 10g (for CIS 612 course) on our systems and my laptop came to a crawl ever since. It would take 10 full minutes before the laptop was in a usable state after bootup.
So i decided, it was high time the laptop got a fresh lease of life and so i backed up all my data (movies, s/w programs, ISO images) etc on DVD (my laptop has DVD+R burner) and then restarted XP Pro for one last time after putting my XP Pro bootable disk into the DVD drive. XP Pro setup began as expected and i chose to delete both partitions i had.
After this step, inexplicably the laptop rebooted and i was getting a fatal error with a message about the ethernet controller and the system would reboot continously. I thought my XP disk was messed up or my partitions were now messed up. So (for some stupid reason) i thought i would install Linux and see if that gave any errors. So i brought out my Fedora Code 3 CDs (all four of em) and gave it a shot. The install was a breeze and so i though all was fine.
Next step, i thought was simple boot up with XP setup and install XP, overwritting the Master Boot Record and the Linux install. (Not so easy as i was to find out).i put in the disc and start the machine and boot up using the CD. The first screen where XP says, 'Setup is now detecting your hardware configuration' would appear and then the computer would freeze.i was flummoxed as to why this was happenning. i thought (add to this is my paranoia ) that something in the hardware was screwed up and repair was beyond my hands.
My laptop is still under its first year warranty, and i remember the guy at BestBuy (where i bought the laptop) say that they would fix my laptop if i brought it in. Since it was friday evening and i had half weekend ahead of me, i thought a quick checkup at bestBuy was in order and began mentally preparing myself for the trip and went to bed slightly uneasy that i had a as-good-as-dead laptop next to me and thoughts of an extended downtime and time-away from my laptop !!!
Posted by Nikhil on Sunday, 22nd May 2005 in TechnoBabble | Fun