It all started from another usual complaint from my mum regarding the speed (or rather, the lack of it) of the ol' family computer. I like to call it the Pentium4. Anyway I ignored it as usual; I couldn't make it much faster than it already was.
Until this morning. You know those flashes of "Ya hor! That might work!" ? I had one of those moments, and from there on the nightmare started.
You see, Pentium4 was configured to dual boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux on separate hard disks a few years ago as an experiment, since I had a leftover hard disk from the now-scrapped Pentium3. Apparently after the experiment the Windows partition slowed down considerably, but for the sake of keeping Ubuntu I lived with it.
As experiments go, Pentium4 didn't use his Ubuntu alter-ego as much as he should. So I decided, on this fateful morning, that it should go. Just remove the old hard disk and everything will be back to normal, right? Or so I thought.
To cut the over-technical story short, installing Ubuntu screwed up the Windows master boot record (or MBR) which controls the booting up of OS when starting up the computer. So I was busy trying to figure out how to repair the MBR, when I accidentally deleted my Windows partition (thanks to Compaq Recovery).
I was left with an unbootable hard disk AND no data to boot (pardon the pun). Thankfully, I had a backup image, so I restored it and prayed it would work. The data was back, but it still wouldn't boot.
I did what most people would do - Google.
To cut another long technical story short, I downloaded a burnt a couple of utility CDs that were supposed to solve the problem, but they didn't work. I got fed up and went ahead with Compaq Recovery to restore my hard disk back to factory settings, hoping that the MBR would be fixed in the process. Nope.
And then I threw down my last card in frustration - wipe out the entire hard disk, and try to restore the backup image which I tried the first time round. If that didn't work, well at least I'd get a 80GB external HDD to play around with. Here's the best part: While attempting the restoration, I noticed an option that I missed out the first time - an option to restore the MBR as well. *facepalm + head-on-wall-banging*
And surprise surprise! It actually worked! After a whole day of trying. Does this warrant a failblog.org entry? Or perhards FML?
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Twisted my knee during soccer yesterday. Not that serious, but it does feel kinda wobbly. I hope it gets better in time for the Muse concert on Wednesday! Standing ticket, of all things.
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