Originally, I planned to hold off on writing one of these things until I was ready to launch the smoking site or The Lab.
Then, my computer died.
I think that might have been largely my fault -- I wasn't exactly happy with not having any room on my C: drive, so I wanted to reformat.
I spent three days trying to get any operating system working. I was about to convert to Linux.
Lemme backtrack....
Day 1
Baron was nice enough to help me figure out how to get rid of the partitions.
Not that it was all that easy. Partition Magic wouldn't touch it.
That should've been a sign. But I don't believe in that shit, so I went on anyway.
We had to FDISK the little fucker, which was probably the simplest possible answer....
I tried doing a fresh install of XP.
It didn't work.
98 wouldn't work, either.
Then Baron's drive [which had a working copy of 98] stopped detecting the CDRoms.
Apparently, autoexec.bat and command.sys got blanked, somehow.
Joy.
Baron was able to fix that, and we tried all sorts of neat tricks to get XP or 98 installed and functioning. Nothing worked.
I went to sleep....
Day 2
We moved the computer out of the room it was in, thinking maybe a change of scenery would make it happy enough to work, or something....
Baron took over entirely and managed to get 98 working [sort of], after fucking around with it all night.
We took it back downstairs, where it worked for, oh, about twenty minutes....
Lather, rinse, repeat....
Day 3
I found out, after a few hours of trying to get stuff to work again, that my 'master boot record' was likely corrupt.
Well, fuck....
But that's okay, I've got yet another drive.
Yay!
But the drive is formatted as an NTFS drive. It can only be read by an NT system.
And: it's got everything important on it.
I repeat: fuck....
So, I installed XP on Baron's drive, and started copying my MP3s, my websites, and my Invader Zim collection...after tricking the computer into recognising the drive.
It froze.
I shut it off.
I restarted it.
It scandisked.
It restarted.
Lather, rinse, repeat....
I eventually beat the endless startup loop by installing XP to another directory, creating a dual boot system unintentionally.
The only reason I did that was to save Baron's magnificent Media collection [you'd have to see it to understand; it's just...wrong...].
Day 4
I tricked it into recognising the drive again and pulled off the 'important stuff'. I can always get more Invader Zim later.
That happened after I burned everything else to CDs. So now I've got five hundred more badly labeled disks lying around to go through again. But at least my stuff isn't missing....
Once that was done, I formatted the little fucker back to FAT32, ripped it out, shut down, and restarted....
Yay. No endless loop.
I shut down, and switched drives.
After entering the serial number, I left with Gremlin and Baron to go get coffee [or, in my case, soda], where I wrote this.
Not that I'm even remotely done. I still have all sorts of stuff to fix, and install, and transfer. I've got a drive I need to try and talk into working as a storage drive....
Remind me never to reformat again....
But, while I'm here, I want to go ahead and thank everyone who helped me on this.
Chainsaw: thanks for the little troubleshooting tech-support thing you did for me. You probably saved me weeks of trouble.
Gremlin, and whoever that guy from the Computer Room was -- the information I got from you guys [the bit about the 8 meg buffer bullshit] was helpful.
But mostly, Baron, thanks for knowing a hell of a lot more about computers and programming than I do, and thanks for putting up with this shit for the past four days.
And once it's back up and running, all of the stuff we need to put up the new NP will be accessible. So everyone can stop wondering about that. Yes, the delay was partly my fault: all of the articles ended up on the NTFS drive, and couldn't be accessed until, well, today.
Enough of that shit.
This is funny: I found out today that, after only two or so weeks of doing the site, Travis quit, saying that he was 'too busy' to do the site.
Ha ha!
I don't think I have anything else to say. Yeah, I'm done. I just can't wait to get back to working on my sites.
More later....
~Hunter