Well, yesterday sucked. Not only did I have a cold (which I still have), but two of my computers died: ‘Europa’, my main laptop; and ‘halley’, my spare machine and OS testbed.
Everything was going quite well up until dinner. I had a working GCC cross-compiler (if you don’t know what that is, don’t bother caring), I had my operating system kernel compiling with no errors, and I had some music playing. All was well. Just before dinner, I noticed that when I played Time by Pink Floyd, it was actually playing an ABBA song. ‘No worries’, I thought. I’d seen this before, and a chkdsk had fixed it. I decided to run a chkdsk before bed that night. So I went to dinner.
I came back into the room after dinner, and found my laptop at the Vista bootup screen, asking me to choose whether to resume a normal boot, or run the memory diagnostic. ‘No worries’, I thought again. Obviously, one of my applications had managed to crash the Vista kernel. Not a difficult task. So I told it to resume booting normally. It didn’t. I powered it off, and then back on again. It still didn’t. My heart sank.
So I got out my trusty Vista installation DVD. I was hoping to repair the Vista process to the point where it would allow me to get into safe mode, and find out what was going on. No such luck. The DVD wouldn’t boot. I don’t know much about Vista’s internal boot process, but I suspect it was around either the time it went to protected (32 bit) mode, or into a non-VGA graphics mode. This was bad. I tried a Windows XP CD, and that didn’t work properly either. I don’t know what the problem is, but it’s serious. On Monday I am going to try and send it back to the manufacturer.
At this point, I was frustrated beyond anything. Now, I don’t only have a laptop. As an avid computer hardware collector, I had another working machine. It was my old server and before that, my main PC. Last night, it had Ubuntu server on it (my ISP has a Ubuntu mirror). So I quickly booted it up. At this stage, all I wanted was to get on the Internet (and more specifically, MSN). Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn’t have a kde-base package (or at least, not one that I could remember the name of). So I sat there for 40 minutes waiting for it to download and install all the KDE packages (including games, useless admin tools and half of TeX Live). When it had finished downloading, I ran ’startx’ (which should, in my opinion, work). It didn’t. None of a number of other commands (xdm, kdm, kde, etc) worked either. Massive Ubuntu failure.
So I tried a Windows XP installation CD over the spare machine. That wouldn’t boot up either. It hung at the point where it loads the Windows components. I tried it with only one hard drive plugged. That didn’t work either. Now came my silliest moment. In anger, I took out the XP CD, and turned off the machine to try and get Ubuntu working again. Unfortunately, I began plugging in the hard drives onto which Ubuntu is installed before the machine had finished turning off. *ZZAP*. And then it didn’t work anymore. I suspect it’s only the power supply that’s dead… but still. Massive human failure.
So now, I have two dead machines. One should be easy to fix (buy new PSU, install fresh Ubuntu desktop, go on MSN). My laptop… well… I think my data has survived, maybe. I’ll let the manufacturer find out. I hate fixing laptops.