Diary Entry For: Thursday the 14th of September 2000

Well, what a turnup for the books. As soon as my computer is set-up exactly as I want it, the whole thing comes crashing down around me, which is really, really annoying seeing as how the same thing happened not more than a month ago; although that time it was because the hard drive had crashed. This time, however, it seems that it was solely because of a corrupted FAT. How this happened is beyond me, mainly because I'm far from being all that technical.

What's strange is that I'd played my turn for an e-mail game of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and had just made a .zip of the save game to send to my opponent then turned off the computer. Everything had been fine. About 4 hours later I turned on the computer to go online and I'm presented with an error message from LILO (Linux Loader - used to allow Linux to exist on a hard drive in one partition and let other operating systems exist in other partitions with no ill effects) telling me something I didn't understand. Naturally, I paniced a bit as this is exactly the same error message I got when my last hard drive went floopy because a crack had developed on it.

In order to fix this, I went straight for my Linux Rescue Disk, and paniced more when it wouldn't boot. All this panicing wasn't helping, of course, as it only helped me to forget that the Rescue disk isn't bootable and should only be used in conjunction with the Boot disk. Because I forgot this, I assumed the rescue disk had a problem that was preventing me from booting with Linux, so I got out my Windows boot disk and managed to boot to an MS-DOS prompt. At lest I was in the computer and what with it being MS-DOS, I had an idea what I was doing.

Flicking through my Linux and PC magazines and books, I came across a LILO error message decoder. It suggested running fdisk /mbr under DOS, so I did. On rebooting, Windows came up automatically and I immediately went online to the only place I know technical people hang out - #drum on L-Space IRC. Thankfully people were there and they gave me some hints on what to do to get my system back up (ie delete the Linux partition because it was obviously the bit that was causing the problems, as the Windows partition was still useable, then reinstall Linux and set-up the partitions again).

Thanks to them the system is running again. Okay, I've lost all my e-mail and data on my Linux drive because I removed the partition and since I only backup once a month I can't get it back (it's been just under a month since I got the new hard drive) but at least everything is working again. Sort of. The Linux system is being incredibly slow. I think it's time to recompile everything I can so that it's compiled with my system in mind, not a generic one - that usually speeds things up.