Mad-Mike
January 13th, 2006, 12:59 PM
Man oh man, talk about a night from hell....I just feel pretty crabby, to a point that I need to vent.....
After THREE years of running reliably, my Windows 98 SE installation finally went belly up and stopped working, however, unlike last time, I'm running a Dual Boot setup between RedHat Fedora Core 2 and you can guess.
Of course, the first thing I did was researched every way I could avoid over-writing the master boot record. After 2-4 hours of research on the internet, I came up with only one way that "Might" save my GRUB boot loader.....Setup /it, or something like that at the time (twas to ignore over-writing the boot sector according to some site). Well, just like usual, "Where do you want to go today..." Turns into "You go where Billy want's you to go today..." (and I'm not meaning Billy Squier or Bill Mahr...either), and I end up being stuck with Windows 98 SE, thank god configuration went over well this time...but jebus, I was stuck with all my back'd up stuff stuck in Fedora Core 2, which was now inaccessable because Micro$***'s operating system decided to do what IT wanted to do and not what I want it to do. Thankfully, with DSL internet in tow, I hunted for a solution....and oh how well THAT went.....
I ended up on a ton of Linux forums, looking for ways to reinstall grub, just about every one ALMOST Worked, except apparently there was some extra configuration to be done that nobody apparently would list. I could NEVER get GRUB back onto the boot sector no matter what I tried....I could get to it, but man oh man, it was irritating. It was bad enough having to download the rescue CD and eat up a ton of Bandwidth doing it!
While installing Windows 98 SE, I realized just how important the Floppy Diskette really is to some of us. I happened to only have MAC formatted disks for my macintosh, or a bunch of 720K floppies I bought at the thrift store for $0.99 for a pack of 5. I tried the 720K, no dice, so I finally got clever and threw a mac floppy in there. So while I may have wasted a floppy, I've learned something new, anyone who says floppies are dead can kiss it! I still use em, my room mate still uses em, heck, her friend who's a professional programmer making lots of dough per year puts a floppy drive in all his machines! Floppy and DOS is dead my arse!
So then I decided to reinstall FC2....but somewhere along the f***ing line my Discs got scratched to where they failed the test. Never to let minor setbacks hold me back from getting what I want/need done, I decided to use them anyway, ending up with FC2 getting stuck mid-install! By then it was 1:59 a.m. this morning, I was hella tired and pissed off at this point, I just got back on Win98, downloaded the first CD ISO...and thought this would be the end to this crap.....nope....the hell had only just begun!
I woke up to find my ISO of the first CD properly downloaded, then it proceeded to work okay, until I got to the SECOND CD! Okay, 2 CD's out of a set that came with a book for $45 screwed up. I tried all I could to remove the scratches to no avail, So now, it's already been 24 Hours since I downloaded that First ISO since I slept, I have the second CD coming in at 58% right now with little over an hour and a half to go. Now I'm thinking, as soon as I'm done with this crap, I'm going to look for some kind of program to backup the boot loader/boot sector, and be able to reinstall it in it's rightful place when I have to re-do Windows again. All I can say, is after my 5 monute use of Linux, and my 5 years of Windows, I'm NEVER spending money on another Micro$oft product again if I can help it. FC2 kicks Win98's arse, it hardly ever crashes (and when it does it won't bring the whole system down 90% the time), TCP/IP in linux works a noticable deal faster than in Windoze, the program layouts are customizable so I can cut out the glammy crap and make a REAL tool out of them rather than some show-off in fancy graphical interface design, and most of all - it's FREE vs. the $99 for XP home or the $99 I spent in 2002 for 98 SE. And I don't need no stinkin' anti-piracy junk either. Plus, I get the fun of script/ini/conf/yadda configuration files to play with like in the good ole Windows 3.1 days (2001-2002 for me), I dunno but I get a sense of acheivement from making MY OWN choices.
Now, after this ISO, all I need to find is a backup utility for the Boot Loader, and then update all this junk tonight while I sleep. THen it's new printer time (got a decent pro-grade HP for $4.99 at te thrift store yesterday).
After THREE years of running reliably, my Windows 98 SE installation finally went belly up and stopped working, however, unlike last time, I'm running a Dual Boot setup between RedHat Fedora Core 2 and you can guess.
Of course, the first thing I did was researched every way I could avoid over-writing the master boot record. After 2-4 hours of research on the internet, I came up with only one way that "Might" save my GRUB boot loader.....Setup /it, or something like that at the time (twas to ignore over-writing the boot sector according to some site). Well, just like usual, "Where do you want to go today..." Turns into "You go where Billy want's you to go today..." (and I'm not meaning Billy Squier or Bill Mahr...either), and I end up being stuck with Windows 98 SE, thank god configuration went over well this time...but jebus, I was stuck with all my back'd up stuff stuck in Fedora Core 2, which was now inaccessable because Micro$***'s operating system decided to do what IT wanted to do and not what I want it to do. Thankfully, with DSL internet in tow, I hunted for a solution....and oh how well THAT went.....
I ended up on a ton of Linux forums, looking for ways to reinstall grub, just about every one ALMOST Worked, except apparently there was some extra configuration to be done that nobody apparently would list. I could NEVER get GRUB back onto the boot sector no matter what I tried....I could get to it, but man oh man, it was irritating. It was bad enough having to download the rescue CD and eat up a ton of Bandwidth doing it!
While installing Windows 98 SE, I realized just how important the Floppy Diskette really is to some of us. I happened to only have MAC formatted disks for my macintosh, or a bunch of 720K floppies I bought at the thrift store for $0.99 for a pack of 5. I tried the 720K, no dice, so I finally got clever and threw a mac floppy in there. So while I may have wasted a floppy, I've learned something new, anyone who says floppies are dead can kiss it! I still use em, my room mate still uses em, heck, her friend who's a professional programmer making lots of dough per year puts a floppy drive in all his machines! Floppy and DOS is dead my arse!
So then I decided to reinstall FC2....but somewhere along the f***ing line my Discs got scratched to where they failed the test. Never to let minor setbacks hold me back from getting what I want/need done, I decided to use them anyway, ending up with FC2 getting stuck mid-install! By then it was 1:59 a.m. this morning, I was hella tired and pissed off at this point, I just got back on Win98, downloaded the first CD ISO...and thought this would be the end to this crap.....nope....the hell had only just begun!
I woke up to find my ISO of the first CD properly downloaded, then it proceeded to work okay, until I got to the SECOND CD! Okay, 2 CD's out of a set that came with a book for $45 screwed up. I tried all I could to remove the scratches to no avail, So now, it's already been 24 Hours since I downloaded that First ISO since I slept, I have the second CD coming in at 58% right now with little over an hour and a half to go. Now I'm thinking, as soon as I'm done with this crap, I'm going to look for some kind of program to backup the boot loader/boot sector, and be able to reinstall it in it's rightful place when I have to re-do Windows again. All I can say, is after my 5 monute use of Linux, and my 5 years of Windows, I'm NEVER spending money on another Micro$oft product again if I can help it. FC2 kicks Win98's arse, it hardly ever crashes (and when it does it won't bring the whole system down 90% the time), TCP/IP in linux works a noticable deal faster than in Windoze, the program layouts are customizable so I can cut out the glammy crap and make a REAL tool out of them rather than some show-off in fancy graphical interface design, and most of all - it's FREE vs. the $99 for XP home or the $99 I spent in 2002 for 98 SE. And I don't need no stinkin' anti-piracy junk either. Plus, I get the fun of script/ini/conf/yadda configuration files to play with like in the good ole Windows 3.1 days (2001-2002 for me), I dunno but I get a sense of acheivement from making MY OWN choices.
Now, after this ISO, all I need to find is a backup utility for the Boot Loader, and then update all this junk tonight while I sleep. THen it's new printer time (got a decent pro-grade HP for $4.99 at te thrift store yesterday).