infinite autochk banana hell
so after 17 hours of ever decreasing circles of success it’s time to give up on the possibility of extracting that photoshop of a stuffed polecat and the pop will eat itself back catalogue as I’m obviously not going to access C:Documents and settings at any time soon before I have to yank the platter out of the system and lob it unceremoniously into the dog toilet of bomb damage whereupon a 14 year old blart will find it take it home and slave it and uncover the names and addresses of all the top ranking officials at the middle school govenor’s committee at which the daily mail will foam at the mouth at the insecurity of our new labour data culture and start a campaign for mandatory arrests for anyone under 18 who looks like they have special needs which will draw robin in to the arguement just to point out why ID cards are so wrong.
having had partial success with chkdsk /r in the past I clutched at that straw as my data became inaccesssible all over the place and had, well, partial success with it. 57% success in fact. after I’d run it for the 4th time. which took 7 hours. before it hung. again. this was all from the recovery console which didn’t really let me do anything else unless I wanted to copy 20,000 files from one folder to another one at a time but I couldn’t even access the folders anway or see the place I would want to copy them to. all I want to do now is save the bits I hadn’t backed up to the external WD 250gb thing and then reformat the internal drive with a hand gun before the new 500gb one turns up on friday just before I go away for a week leaving everyone at home without a wireless connection for the old PC downstairs which is the club penguin access point or email. here’s how clever I am: admin tools -> computer management -> disk management -> properties -> tools -> error checking -> check the boxes for repairing bad things -> reboot to give exclusive access to disk. hey presto! infinite fricken autochk loop. as something was completely arsed up due to me defragging some system files onto a bad disk sector – oh yes, that’s fine sir, we’ll just put that useful utility over here, on top of the BROKEN STUFF – when autochk kicks off upon a reboot (for tis autochk that does the work) it never completes and I have to take a hammer to the big button on the front of the case to restart. and upon restart, autochk kicks off and never completes and so I have to take a bigger hammer to the broken button on the front of the case to restart. and upon restart etc.
I think I have dirty bits. I’ve been told that before, but this time it’s my computer telling me. more accurately, it’s probably a boot file or something file telling my broken XP installation that it has raised a white flag that says ‘dirty bit’ on it and so everything must go mad. you can unset this flag and autochk doesn’t run, which is useful. but you can’t do that from the recovery console. oh no. you have to have a proper shell to do that so that’s ok, you can’t log in to windows to get a shell because authchk won’t let you, but we all know that you can just run in safe mode and do it that way. easy. F8 F8 F8 F8, er, yes, I want safe mode. good. right. ooh, lots of cmd line references to drivers and stuff whizzing past which looks promising. hmm. I guess it’s stopped at that one because it’s REALLY BIG or something. hmm. it’s not that big. hang on. you’re not doing anything are you? (cue enormous hammer case button action). 3 attempts later and it’s clear that safe mode is going to steadfastly refuse to run and that the little people inside the machine are now laughing uncontrollably behind thier hands at my total lack of adequacy in resolving this technocrisis. and don’t you start telling me what to google in order to get the answers I need to work around this problem BECAUSE I’VE BEEN DOING THAT ALL FRICKEN DAY ON MY OTHER COMPUTER WHICH HAS SCSI DISKS SO NO I CAN’T JUST RUN IT AS A MASTER AND SLAVE THE BROKEN DISK AND NO I DON’T HAVE A CD OF LINUX THAT CAN RUN THE OS AND HAS THESE GREAT TOOLS TO EXTRACT FILES FROM THE BOOT DISK WHICH YES IS JUST ONE HUGE PARTITION I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW ALREADY THANKYOU.
at eleven thirty I am instructed to walk away before throttling myself with a USB cable tidy and I contemplate a life without XTC or all my old tweaked flickr files.
install. yes, just a clean install dammit. go on, do your worst. oh, that was quick. and you haven’t trashed the old files? nice. here’s an external drive. recognize that? ooh yes. lovely. right, is everything from The Smiths to Windsor for the Derby still intact? and that picture I took out of the window landing at Denver which was actually interesting? ooh, there it is. would you mind if I just move it over there? thanks awfully.
today I will mostly be installing XP Professional and Adobe Creative Suite 2.3. I’m not putting anything else on here. maybe the router. oh, and the laser mouse. maybe need the printer. and sonicstage. better get the drivers for the 7900GT too. and the audigy 2. oh, better make sure the wireless is installed. and the selphy. probably need to install sp2 and everything since then as well. better do that first I guess. ooh, and the new drivers for the WD drive etc. etc. etc. etc. etc….