Yesterday was one of my worst computer days of my life. I had trouble installing debian on a particular area on my hard drive, consistently. I tried reinstalling about 15 times on that area but every time something would fail. And the annoying thing about the debian install is the fact that it does never give error messages like beloved windows. It just stops bang in the middle, no sign of life.
Even naughtier than that was the way windows treated me. I went back to windows after the hundredth unsuccessful debian netinstall. So I decide that windows can have the crappy partition and I?ll give a better area of my hard drive to debian.? So I go to disk management (remember kids, this is stupid, use a decent partition manager) and when I try erasing the partition, Windows gives me a nice little bubble saying that there was a delayed write and my partitions are lost. And that too in a little warning bubble. Hello? Do you fu*ing hear me Mr. Gates? 3 years of music collections, 5698 songs, 29.2GB, all wiped. All my project work, all my downloads, all my server data, visual studio, and everything all GONE and what does it show me? A stupid mofoking bubble which disappears when I click on it and it?s gone.
I almost threw up and felt dizzy. I always felt secure about my data. I never really faced hard drive problems before. So I had to recollect myself and I had a dvd full of diagnostic tools and basically a computer unf***ing kit. I recovered my partitions and got my data back. I knew what was wrong. I had a partition table corruption. This was in a way my worst fear. I had to perform a full low level wipe of my 80gb hard drive. I freed up space on my backup 40 gb hard drive and backed up my most important files and mirrored some of my most precious and rare music on a dvd.
I nearly fainted after I had to confirm the wipe. I used a bootup utility and it asked for four confirmations making absolutely sure I knew what I was doing. It took nearly 20 mins to finish the job.
Once it was done, I pulled my Fedora Core 6 DVD out. Funny really. I got windows XP three years after it released. I?m installing operating systems three days after they release now. The install worked fine with only one minor hitch and the desktop looked great. Then I was greeted by pleasant news that there?ll be a local mirror for fedora core 6 repositories available in a couple of days. There was a happy ending after all.
More on FC6 later.
On an endnote, I might add to my shock and amazement the brilliance of mandriva programmers. Earlier I?d tried installing mandriva on the faulty partition and this is what it told me:
?I?m afraid I can?t read the partition tables on /dev/hdb/ because the partition tables may be corrupt 
Of course, I can erase the partition tables and rewrite them but I?m afraid you?ll lose all your data and partitions. Or you can configure the filesystem manually with partdrake.
Do you agree to lose all your data??
(o) Yes
( ) No
Whoah, a first person error message. Microsoft should take a word? or two from these guys. It won?t be long before we?ll be seeing.
?oops, my bad?
And yes. There was indeed an emoticon in my error message.
1 Response to “OF error messages, emoticons and happy endings”
lol!! I’m really sorry for what happened there, but Windoze is funny! I never could figure out the deal with it when I used to use it (and they claim it’s so fuckin user friendly and stuff???). Thank whoever-it-may-please that I read about RMS back in 2003 and got hooked to his philosophy of Free Software.