OneAndOneIs2

Yesterday evening, whilst at a Linux User Group meeting (Possible connection here, come to think of it) my laptop, which was booted into Vista at the time, crashed. And subsequently refused to boot: It went into the "System repair" option instead. Slowly. Very, very slowly.

Despite my vast preference for Linux over Windows, the laptop has been almost exclusively running Vista from day one. It came with Vista installed, and when I bought it, I was away from home and it would be a while before I could get a Linux installation sorted. So I shoved Firefox and Thunderbird onto it, disabled most of the annoying "Vista-ness" and it was pretty decent for the most part. If all you're using a machine for is to run some multi-platform software, who cares what OS it is?

Then I got back to the UK, and tho I did sort out an Ubuntu installation, my internet access was always either via mobile broadband or wifi, both of which were a complete pain to get working under Linux. So I pretty much stuck with Vista for daily use. The hardware worked, the software was the same FOSS as I'd use on any OS, and I had too much else on my plate to take the time needed to get Linux up to scratch.

Luckily, I had at least gotten so far as to get mobile broadband working under Ubuntu. Because, last night, Vista died.

I tried mounting the partition from Windows, but it didn't want to know. And the Linux NTFS utilities couldn't do anything. So I nabbed the Vista Recovery CD off BitTorrent, and gave it a go.

It wasn't painfully slow. It was CRIPPLINGLY slow. It took nearly half an hour to get to the point where it would scan for Windows installations. And then it would fail to find any, and tell me to load the drivers needed for the hard-drive if I wanted to get any further.

So after loading every SCSI, SATA, RAID and other likely-looking driver, it still didn't seem to find anything. But it let me onto the next stage, and was able to repair the partition enough that I've grabbed all my files onto my Ubuntu partition. So that's a relief.

Windows will boot fine, but locks up within a couple minutes. It crashes without loading if I go in via safe mode. I don't think anything short of a re-install is going to fix it, and I don't have the disk here. And can't burn a new one because Vista crashes too quick to even start it.

But because all the software I was using is FOSS, I've copied the files over and Firefox and Thunderbird in particular are carbon-copies.

It's a huge PITA tho.

On the plus side, I've got so much free time on my hands it's driving me nuts, so at least it gave me something to do for a while.