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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13828
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You know those "fever dreams" that you get that keep going round and round and round. And you never get decent sleep and alwasy wake sweating?
I am in the middle of one of those.
I am now on my second "format c:" in two days.
It started well. I was really happy. A little happy bunny when, on Tuesday, I upgraded various machines, including the one I'm typing on now to XP Professional. It took a while. A couple of hours for the install, a couple more for the updates.
I upgraded them all to Office Professional for XP too. Lovely. Really happy. Two of them are still working. One is busy formatting.
Yesterday morning it went into a death spiral. Screen powered down, disk powered up. So I gave it the three fingered salute... to no avail. Reset. Same again. Safe Mode. Same again. Safe mode. Same again. Forgot safe mode. It booted, stabilised, crashed. Safe mode worked. Safe mode crashed.
I forced it, somehow, through repeated Safe Mode boots into life, and got the last remaining data off it. It's on the D drive.
Booted from diskette.
Format c:
Tried to boot from the XP Cd.
Not bootable.
Swore.
Booted from the boot diskette. Ran setup.exe on the cd. The drive whizzed and the screen said "This may not be run in DOS!". Well excuse me!. So I panicked.
Then I had a brianwave. Reinstalled minimum featured Win98, and then ran a total install of XP. Good move. Swapped the D driev to NTFS and was content. The machine booted and stabilised and RAN.
Windows Update failed. And failed. And failed.
There are screeds written on why this happens. Inmy case the date on the mcahine had been set to 2011, and that meant the M$'s security certificates looked as though they'd expired. So it refused. Now these updates are needed.
No other software on the machine so I started to install them. An hour later the machine went into the death spiral again. (thei si the abridged version). I have now created 6 diskettes which are alleged to boot straight onto XP and will try those after the format finishes.
I had an interlude with my c drive, too. I booted with tyhe 6 horsemen of the appocalypse before. They offered me the chance to NTFS my c drive. So I did. When the install crashed (!) I found I could no longer format my c drive. So I had to break it with fdisk first.
In the middle so all this I am very happy to announce that IO am sending a battalion of gnomes to be forcibly inserted in Bill Gates. I'll format the bastard!
Oh, and Just Hit Send has a new chapter up!
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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