Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Bite me, Bill
killjoy, my Windows 98 box, suddent froze up.
Okay, it's Windows. That's expected. It's happened to me plenty of
times. And when the three-fingered
salute doesn't work, then it's time to hit that big 'ol red
switch (or in my case, the white switch on the front of the box), wait
for scandisk to finish its fandango on the drives and it's back
to what I was doing when the system crashed.
Only this time, scandisk didn't run. The system spit out an
error message about a missing VXD file and dropped me to the
C:\ prompt.
Not good.
Spring has a dual-boot system; Windows 2000 and Windows 98. Time to bring up Windows 98 on her system, and using sneakernet, copy files from her system to my system in the hopes I can get it back up and running.
I restore the missing file, reboot.
More missing files. This time I didn't even get a C:\ prompt, which was really not good! I attempted to format a bootable floppy disk on Spring's machine only to have it crash. Quite hard.
Fortunately, scandisk ran on her system. But the second I
attempted to format the floppy disk, it crashed again!
By this time, I had rebooted my system and fortunately, it came up with a menu, allowing me to boot up to the command line (C:\). But with Spring's Windows 98 acting all wierd, I decided to use Windows 2000 to copy the files.
Long story short—too many files are missing (including the
very important krnl386.exe—sigh) so until further
notice, I'm out one Windows box.
I'd switch the box over to Linux, but first I need to see if it supports the scanner I have (I know Linux now has limited support for the webcam I have, and if the scanner is supported, then goodbye Windows!
