2 Days of Fun

Friday....moving the mouse, so the screensaver switches off... but ... Windows XP boot screen? I am quite sure, I left the PC on... and why is it stuck in the boot screen? ...

Well, nothing as sweet as pushing reset...10 seconds later...boot screen...same deal...

Reset... F8... last known good install ... and a surprise: icons of software I uninstalled about 5 months ago appeared ... so I cleaned up the desktop, all worked again. I also had to uninstall the software, even though it wasn't really installed.

Took me 3 hours. Ah, fine. I don't mind, once in a while. It was a MS update btw that was installed during the night and triggered the reboot. No idea what happened or what was installed exactly.

Before I went to bed, I did some backups, left the PC running -- as always.

Saturday...moving the mouse...the desktop is still there, but I need to install a new piece of software, which requires me to reboot... splash screen....still splash screen.... DAMN!

So, I tried the same approach as yesterday. No luck.

I tried using the recovery console. No luck.

Then... I used a repair install... it hangs when trying to "install devices"...repeat 5 times. Still...NO LUCK.

Final try, backing up the image from the HD I did yesterday.... oh well, here we go.

Let's check the HD for errors.. ok, there is an inconsistency in the NTFS table....

As I have a deadline for my diploma thesis, I start transfering all the data from my desktop PC to the laptop....

... 5 hours later... laptop has now the same data as the desktop PC, which runs and reboots again... no idea what triggered the NTFS error... no idea why it happens right now as I need to get work done...

I guess, we all have to deal with Murphy sooner or later...

Two days. Time well-spent.

But as a colleague told me today: "It's good, we love or job."

Take that for the weekend -- may you have a more exciting one than me.