Blogcoven

One of the problems with being married to someone who is skilled at the crafting arts is when they do “Craft” a gift for you, you know deep down that nothing you could buy in return is ever really gonna be able to match up. You really gotta fight fire with fire. Alas, a handcrafted Bloodbowl team sheet, or a min-max DnD character were unlikely to make the grade, at least not for a major holiday. However, my one other skill is that I’m fairly handy with Windows. In particular, the backup and reinstallation of said operating system. So, it was this skill (along with a significant RAM upgrade) that I offered to my darling dearest as a gift this Christmas.

That was my first mistake.

Now, let me just stop you goddamn Linux people now. Fuck off. I’m not installing Linux. If you want to preach the virtues of Ubuntu or whatever, go to some loser techie site, and do it there. I really don’t care. Really. (Editor’s Note: And if she wanted Linux on that machine, she’d install it herself.)

We finally decided that this past weekend was a good time to do the deed. So we got all set up. The first obstacle was that amount of crap on her machine. It’s an older system: a Dell Inspiron 1150, with a 30b HDD packed to the rafters with knitting patterns and Power Point slides. So, gotta get ‘em off. So, I’m transferring away and Bam. “Your estimated wait time is 2430 hours.” Right…so assuming I don’t have an entire goddamn season to spend on this, I’d need to figure out what the hell is going on. I guessed it was just misreading the file sizes, said “Whatever,” and let it tick. The whole thing took about 4 hours to backup and verify. Fair enough. Of course, once everything is backed up, Dixie pointed out, “Oh, you didn’t need to back that up.” Well…shit. What’s done is done, and it’s better to have the file and not need it, etc.

So, that went relatively smoothly. Next came the Actual Installation. “Where are the installation CDs?” After producing several CDs of applications that came with the computer, the laptop’s owner concluded she did not, in fact, have the Windows installation CDs.

Bollocks.

Right. No CDs. Well, we can order ‘em from Dell, but it’ll cost an arm and a leg, and will take forever. On top of that, it’s freaking XP Home. No, no, no…this will not do. Then it turn out that Caltech has a site license for XP. Yay! Everything is saved. What’s better, one of our friends has already burned a copy and we can yoink it. The day is saved, right?

Is it fuck. Strap yourselves in, bitches, we’ve only just begun.

The laptop refused to boot from the CD. I tried a 2nd CD that was burned, just in case. Nada. Hmm… Let’s see if it’s reading the CD at all: boot to Windows, pop in the CD, wait. The drive just spins there…trying to read. Like a newly blinded man clutching the last Harry Potter novel with a tear in his eye. Is the drive fuxxored? I pop in a DvD. “The Mummy” spins up right away and works fine. Right…I check the CD itself. Pop both of them into my (awesome) laptop. And voila! It reads. Right, so, it might be these burns. I try to recreate the CD on my system. Wrong again. The CD drive just faffs around again and doesn’t see anything.

“OK, Maybe it’ll only read CDs it makes itself,” I think. I’ve seen it before. We get the downloaded iso on the laptop, burn it to disk…and no. The drive doesn’t read shit. I take the newly burned CD out of her laptop, pop it in mine…and it works perfectly.

Let me repeat that.

I take the CD out of her system, which wrote the CD and doesn’t read it, and into mine, which reads it perfectly. That’s the equivalent of being able to [em]write[/em] Spanish, but not [em]read[/em] it. At this point my frustration was reaching the boiling point. I was about a .dll error message away from flinging the system out the window. We live on the ground floor, with vegetation all around, so the laptop would probably have been fine, but that wasn’t really on my mind at the time.

Right, so it looks like it’ll only read Official CD’s not Burns. All we have are burns. Ok…lets try the long bomb. Lets try the Bootable Flash Drive method.

After a bitchload of net surfing and forum posts, I got directed to this page. It requires that you download three files. First off, there is only one fucking place on the Internet to get these files. And it’s slow. Dog slow. Like “oh-my-god-I-could-have-fucking-written-this-program-faster-myself” slow. I eventually downloaded the files. I do what the site says and sure enough, after a few missteps, I have the prepped Flash drive (I used a 1 GB stick), and am ready to give this a try.

Success!!! We have the Windows Install. Huzzah. It’s all good now, right?

Ha ha.

So, as anyone who has done a Full XP Build can tell you, there are 2 parts to the install. The blue text-based part where you format and partition the drives and then copy the Install files to the newly pristine C Drive. Then there’s the GUI part that actually installs the OS. I will make a long story short and say it did the first part…but not the second.

So it partitioned the drive, formatted it blank…and that’s it. For those of you following along at home…at this point I had an expensive, laptop-shaped brick in front of me, and the urge to kill rising inside of me. Right, back on the Net, asking it in a variety of ways, “What the Fuck?” Where is the post that says “Hey Bob, I followed your instructions, and busted my wife’s laptop. Now I’m broke, divorced, and giving handjobs in the bathroom of the Olive Garden to pay for my Crack addiction. Any thoughts?”

Lo and behold, I did find something. Apparently there was a tick box under the formatting options that should have been pre-configured a particular way. It wasn’t. I set it up that way, and re-did from start.

10 hours, 2 gallons of sweat, and a string of curse words that would make a sailor blush later, and her laptop is up and running.

Never again.