I woke up this morning and was excited to talk to my parents (living in Ireland) over Skype. But as I tried to boot up my laptop, it hung after the Dell splash screen. I tried rebooting a few times to no avail. So I pulled out my Accenture laptop and decided to use it to talk to my parents while simultaneously trying to troubleshoot my personal laptop (it's nice having 4 laptops in your room... you never stress too much when one breaks).
Because I regularly perform backups I wasn't too stressed about losing the information on the computer. But it's always a pain. So I Googled to see what I could find out. I tried repairing using the XP boot disk -didn't work. I booted Ubuntu to make sure all my files were still there - they were. I tried the XP repair again, and as it was running I realized that I should go to the repair command line and run fixboot and fixmbr. But when the computer restarted, it would no longer boot from CD. (Getting frustrated at this point...) So I decided to dump my files onto another external hard drive just to have an extra backup. Ubuntu couldn't mount my drive. I ran into that same situation at work with a colleague last week and didn't want to spend more time fixing it.
So... I pulled out the hard drive, connected it to my Accenture laptop via USB, and am using the Accenture laptop as an in-between for my personal drive and my external backup. And then I'm going to wipe my personal drive and start over.
Starting over is always remarkably refreshing. Your OS is so much faster and less cluttered. You don't bother installing all those stupid programs you were messing around with. So in a way, it's not all bad. But I had much more exciting plans for my Saturday than this...
The good news is that I had a great conversation with my parents. I found out that my great grandpa grew up in Aalborg, Denmark (near Elsinore), and my great grandmother grew up in Falkerslev, Denmark (on the island of Falster).
My dad and I also talked stalks and business cases (he's a strategy professor) for a while. It's really nice having such a knowledgeable resource in your own family :)
3 comments:
that's why you look so danish! the last name might have given it away a little bit too..
haha, Derek, I here's what you should have done... walked, no RAN over to your nearest Apple store and purchased a mac. That's what I did and computing has just been such a pleasurable, enjoyable, PAIN-FREE experience since :)
Baby steps, Chris. Did you know I already broke down and got an iPhone?
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