SuperSatellite

Who’s yo daddy?

// April 19th, 2006 // Hardware, Software, Tech

***NOTE: The following blog contains language that might be found to be geeky and uninteresting to most normal people. Tough.***

You know what, sometimes I just thing I need to stop. “Mr. Fienen, put down the CD-R and step away from the computer!” But seriously. For the second time in as many months, I nearly scrapped my main drive on my desktop. For once though, I came out on top.

Back story. You might recall my mentioning killing it a while back. Well, that was not my fault actually, just the inevitable death of an old drive. So I replaced it with a new 160Gb drive. Partitioned it and set up to dual boot Windows and Linux using GRUB. Well, the other night I needed some extra space for some video I was editting together. I haven’t used Linux in a while, mostly because I wanted to play with a new distro, so I formatted the partition for NTFS and used it to drop some video on.

Then I realized the error in my ways. Rebooting gave me a nifty “error 22″ from GRUB when the computer came on. Why? Because the partition the boot record was stored on was gone. Deleted by yours friggin’ truly. Well damn… What to do, right? I tried using my install CD to get to the recovery console and fix stuff, but the Administrator password I have used for ages “mysteriously” no longer worked. I was able to use a basic boot CD to force it to just ram the first part of the drive through and into Windows. It worked okay, so I went with it. I used the opportunity to pull up what is now my new best friend. UBCD4Win. I found this by accident. It’s sorta a pain to build the first time around (it’s not just a ready to go ISO, although the v3.0 promises to change that. It’s now on RC5, so I’m thinking new version very soon).

So from there I rebooted with a copy of UBCD4Win. This thing is slick. Sorta like a Windows Live CD, though not really. It’s just Windowsesque. But it comes packed with tools. And since it runs from the CD, you can work on things like hard drives without problem. Unless you’re me and manage to just flat out erase the MBR. Why did I do this? The short answer is tool misuse. I went in the wrong order with a partition tool I was unfamiliar with and just brought the whole partition table crashing down around me. Fantastic. Restarting the comp assured me it had no clue what it was doing with that drive now. Boot media? What boot media?

But, being the useful CD it is, I was able go back in with it to scan the drive, and it saw there were clearly two partitions, and it restored them. I set the first one as active, and rebooted. It tried so hard to start. It really did. But in the end it just sat there, cursor blinking, unsure what to do. But at least no error, and I had confirmed with UBCD4Win that the file structure was just fine and dandy. Reboot again. Among the tools on the CD is a Windows password reseter. I was able to change the Admin password that I apparently forgot somewhere along the road from there and boot with the normal XP install CD then, login to the recovery console fine, and run fixmbr. And POOF! I have a repaired computer finally.

As far as I an concerned, UBCD4Win is now a permanent addition to my toolbox, that thing is super neato. Granted if I would not be dumb to begin with…