05/18/2005: "Ventilation"

I think that someone, somewhere is trying to keep my off of my computer. My desktop that is, my laptop is doing fine so far. Last night I was just about to get settled in for a fine bit of computerized entertainment... of what type you ask? why the possiblities were practically unlimitless... when to my great joy the massive windstorm outside appearently knocked over a telephone pole or something somewhere and that was it. No fine computerized entertainment for me. Especially lucky was the fact that pretty much all my portable electronic devices did not have charged batteries. The power eventually came back on, about 15 minutes after I fell asleep I think it was. But that, that was nothing compared to tonight.

Do the words "corrupted system hive" have any partictular meaning to any of you? If you've never heard this phrase you are a lucky lucky individual. What it means, you see, is that your windows system registry is basically no more. This is, in my opinion, worse than a hard drive crash because basically your whole system and everything is there and should be running fine, but it's not. It's dead. So with a hard drive crash at least you know everything's gone and you're gonna have to reinstall and run some recovery software to salvage what you can from the dead drive, but with this I absolutely *have* to try to fix it. I can't just give up on the installation since it's such an enormous pain to try to reinstall everything.

So I restored the last registry backup which was from... erk... January, only to have it come up with one of my very favorite boot errors: Inaccessible Boot Device. This means that Windows can't find a driver for something so it's just not gonna start. Which strikes me as really stupid. I mean, I'm not an OS programmer but you'd think that they could make it so if the registry can't find something, it just skips it. But perhaps that's just naïveté on my part. So I'm following the M$ proposed fix... you have to install a second copy of Windows, run regedit on the broken hive, figure out what's not loading right and disable it. Had I been easygoing enough to just say "Eh, I'll reinstall" some 5 hours ago, I'd probably have pretty much everything back up and running at this point. Which is probably what I should just do now, since I'll have at least 4 months of stuff to reinstall anyway.

Alright, well, my parallel installation is almost done so I'll stop venting for the moment. Hopefully my next post will come from happier computer-climes.