I woke up, didn't feel as bad as yesterday, got up a bit after 9am, got ready, and left a bit after 10am.

Some mail had been dumped on my doorstep, including a package, and a slip to pick up a parcel.

I looked at the slip, it's dated the 13th. My cd/mp3 player. I have to pick it up from the post office.

I grabbed it all, package, envelopes, and the slip. I decided to go and get my cd player.

I didn't think to grab my old one, so I haven't got any batteries, or an mp3 cd.

I went to the post office, got my package, showed my expired nsw drivers license for proof of address, no arguments.

Took off, went to work. Got in just after 11am.

I started doing some work, copying a bunch of files off one of the servers.

my machine BSODs, some nasty message about kernel paging or something. Ok, it's just a swap file problem, no worries. I'm annoyed I've lost my uptime, and I had a ton of pages open in firefox I needed, and unsaved text documents with scraps of shell scripts I've writing. Oh well.

I sit and look at the BSOD for a minute.

I turn the machine off, and turn it back on again.

Up comes the starting XP hideous screen. About 2 dots come up in the bar, and then it immediately BSODs again. "INACCESSABLE BOOT DEVICE" or something.

Uh, great.

Try again, nope, same crap.

The disk isn't dead.. or else I wouldn't see that hideous XP screen. It's just XP being useless.

I turned it off for a couple of minutes, and tried again, same thing. OK. Now what?

I don't have my cd case with me, with my knoppix disc in it, so I can't try that.

I grabbed a spare machine, and old PII 350. I opened my machine, scabbed the disk out of it, and put it in the 350.

Booted it up (win2000). It wanted to check the disk, I skipped that, let me try accessing it first.

I tried to access my disk (once the machine finished booting, about 15 minutes later), didn't get anywhere. Some rubbish about "invalid inpage operation" or something.

Explorer crashed, but wouldn't go away, I couldn't do anything else. I started downloading knoppix on a working machine. Thank god for the fast connection at work (256 kilobytes (yes, _kilobytes_) / second coming in. It's only going to take about 45 minutes to download 700mb.

I read some newsgroups about the problem. "chkdsk /r" is the answer apparently. I rebooted the 2000 PC, and kicked off "chkdsk /r" against my disk. It went into phase 1 of 5, came up with stuff about "removing invalid attributes" and then it said a whole bunch of file segments were unreadable.

I opened my parcel, and looked at the cd player. woo, a cdplayer. No batteries the cheap bastards.

a cheesy looking remote control, a charger, and a set of headphones. Headphones? who uses those? useless.

I opened the package, the The WHo CDs I ordered a while ago, of the concert we went to. Cool.

They're in these cardboard bootleg looking cases, and they're individually printed, groovy.

I sat and read the paper while I waited for chkdsk to run, and also for knoppix to download.

It eventually got to phase 2, now it added attributes to files, and then it removed some orphan file segments or something, and then it said "an unspecified error occured".

Great.

Tried to access the disk again, same "invalid inpage error" or some crap. It's made no difference.

Knoppix has finished, so I burned a copy. I rebooted the 350 off the knoppix cd, tried to access my disk, oh look, there's everything!

I scabbed all my data off, onto one of the servers. I only had a few hundred meg I wanted, but there were no spare hard disks to put the stuff on.

I got everything I needed except for 1 or 2 files, which were lost, but they were only a couple of text files.

When I tried to look at the directories I'd been copying the files into when the machine crashed, I got a bunch of seek errors. Ah, so that's what did it.. the disk had damage, and when I put stuff on it, windows just shat itself.

Having some files that are in a damaged part of the disk (that aren't part of windows) shouldn't effect windows from booting or running in the slightest. Stupid crap.

Once I had everything, I took the disk out, put it back in my pc, put it all back together.

I went across the road, got some lunch, and bought some batteries for my cd player. As I walked over there, I called my mate to let him know the CDs were here, and arranged to drop one off to him tonight. I'm thinking I'll take off early today, I can't do anything, my machine's screwed, and after spending hours rescuing my data, I've had enough of the shit.

I got back to the office.

I ran the disk check in the BIOS, and it failed with error 7 or something, whatever that means.

I looked on the dell website, I can't find where to log a ticket, it must be well hidden, and I don't want to ring them up, they're one of the useless companies with a call centre in India.

I don't think I will buy the dell laptop I've been thinking about for about 6 months, I'm sick of these companies with Indian call centres, exploiting the Indians for cheap labour.

it's now 5pm. What a complete waste of a day. I've done nothing but salvage my data (oh, and the 5 minutes of copying files that are now lost, before my machine crashed).

I love the irony of the fact that a reverse engineered driver (ntfs support in linux) works better than the original.

Windows can't even mount its own filesystem, but a hacked up ntfs driver (which the authors claim doesn't work properly) worked perfectly, mounted the disk without a single complaint, and I was able to salvage almost all of my data off it, except for the stuff parked in physically damaged parts of the disk, and windows didn't want to let me get anything.

Why do people use NTFS? there's no security, and one little bit gets stuffed up, for whatever reason, and you lose the whole partition. Pointless.

More to the point.. Why the hell do people use windows?

"more productive" my arse.

I'm running the machine _off a CD_ and I can do everything and more than I could do in windows.

The only annoying thing is that the knoppix disk doesn't have an agp module for the cheesy onboard video in the machine (dell craptiplex 270), so it only runs in 640x480. I think I'll take my spare 64mb geforce card with me tomorrow, and install it. Then I'll just run off the CD until I get a new hard disk (and then I'll install the knoppix cd on it).

I didn't use windows for anything, except a window manager, I was running a bunch of copies of putty, logged into all the servers, and firefox.

Oh, and I was using "Dev-php" which is pretty good, but I'm sure there's a better PHP ide in linux.

There's nothing I do that requires windows, and it's just a pain in the arse.

I left work a bit after 6pm, put my cdplayer on, with the first The Who CD in it. Sounds good.

I stopped for fuel, and then kept going. A couple of skips out of the CD player, but it's in my backpack, and I've never had a cd player that would work in my backpack when I'm riding. (the first one wouldn't even work in my backpack if I was _walking_).

As soon as I got on the freeway, the CD player started mucking up, it couldn't handle the vibration. So much for the antishock. Let's hope it's better on mp3 discs, and when it's in the saddle bag. (although the cord to the cheesy remote is pretty damn short).

I'm getting sick of these cd players. I know I'm going to end up biting the bullet and buying a hard disk based mp3 player, but I don't want to spend $600, and I don't want to buy an apple product, but I don't know that anything else available is not an inferior copy.

I got to my mate's place, just as I'm about to turn into his driveway, some dickhead does a handbrake turn on the gravel on the side of the road, so I end up waiting in the middle of the road to work out what the hell he's doing, eventually moves, and I can get off the road.

I gave my mate his CD set, and chatted to him for about 1/2 hour.

I took off, rode towards home, stopped at the GoLo (or BiLo?) and got some food for dinner, then I came home.

What a complete waste of a day. I went all the way to work, to achieve absolutely nothing, and come home again.

Pointless.

I'm listening to CD2 of The Who now (already listened to 1 properly since getting home), and I'm really impressed. It's excellently mastered.

Don't Get Fooled Again!