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annathepiperSo last night there I am hammering away on my laptop, doing my usual things with it, when Norton AntiVirus launches to do its weekly scan. Partway through, the drive starts making some really disturbing noises, and then the system starts slowing down significantly. Alarmed, I tried to cancel out of there and reboot.
The thing started telling me one of two things, trying to boot back up. Either a) "Operating system not found", the same alarming words I'd been seeing out of it before, or b) once it actually made it back into Windows and launched Scandisk, that it found a data error in the root directory and could not fix the drive. Grf.
Fortunately, I had my other shiny new hard drive that I'd ordered during the last round of computer issues... though I had a bit of an adventure trying to get Windows XP, which I had installed on it with no problems, to talk to my wireless network card. That required me to get Dar to scamper up to dlink.com for me and scarf the appropriate driver, then I had to burn it down to CD because it was too big to fit onto a floppy and I had no other way of getting it onto my laptop; then I had to get Dar's help with the CD burner since the durned thing was not plugged in properly and confusing me immensely, because it was throwing off bogus error messages about wanting a DLL that I knew damn well was already on the system.
Once I actually got the drivers onto the system, I got to be confused all over again trying to figure out how to actually configure the freggin' card. I had the data from the previous install but wasn't sure how to actually feed it to Windows XP to make the connection go. I entered in the data but could not seem to make the computer see the house network...
Until I decided to say fuck it for a while, and kick the thing into hibernation mode and go out and run a couple of errands. When I came back, and came out of hibernation, I suddenly was on the network. Go figure!
Half of me is now impressed that magic appears to have happened, and the other half would rather kind of like to know exactly what happened just because I'd like to, well, know what happened.
Now, though, I have to re-install all my programs on the new hard drive. This'll take a while.
The thing started telling me one of two things, trying to boot back up. Either a) "Operating system not found", the same alarming words I'd been seeing out of it before, or b) once it actually made it back into Windows and launched Scandisk, that it found a data error in the root directory and could not fix the drive. Grf.
Fortunately, I had my other shiny new hard drive that I'd ordered during the last round of computer issues... though I had a bit of an adventure trying to get Windows XP, which I had installed on it with no problems, to talk to my wireless network card. That required me to get Dar to scamper up to dlink.com for me and scarf the appropriate driver, then I had to burn it down to CD because it was too big to fit onto a floppy and I had no other way of getting it onto my laptop; then I had to get Dar's help with the CD burner since the durned thing was not plugged in properly and confusing me immensely, because it was throwing off bogus error messages about wanting a DLL that I knew damn well was already on the system.
Once I actually got the drivers onto the system, I got to be confused all over again trying to figure out how to actually configure the freggin' card. I had the data from the previous install but wasn't sure how to actually feed it to Windows XP to make the connection go. I entered in the data but could not seem to make the computer see the house network...
Until I decided to say fuck it for a while, and kick the thing into hibernation mode and go out and run a couple of errands. When I came back, and came out of hibernation, I suddenly was on the network. Go figure!
Half of me is now impressed that magic appears to have happened, and the other half would rather kind of like to know exactly what happened just because I'd like to, well, know what happened.
Now, though, I have to re-install all my programs on the new hard drive. This'll take a while.
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no subject
Date: 2002-10-12 05:24 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2002-10-13 12:15 pm (UTC)Though this story does have a happy ending, in that I somehow magically managed to get back into Windows 98 on the old hard drive last night, so I set it to do an immediate backup, and went to bath and bed. So no more hard drive flipping and rescuing of homeless waif files required. I'm golden. :)
no subject
Date: 2002-10-12 06:46 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2002-10-13 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-10-13 09:05 am (UTC)So if I turn the computer on before plugging in the network cable, these days, I just restart the computer to get the network to work.
Re:
Date: 2002-10-13 12:19 pm (UTC)I'm digging this way faster bootup time, though. Of course, part of this is doubtless due to me doubling the amount of RAM I've got on the system, but still, my bootup time is now wicked fast.