I am so sick of stuff not working on my stupid computers. Now my secondary machine, the one I use for storage of music and old data I care about, is all frotzed. It won’t boot at all, it says that one of NT’s system files is missing or corrupt. And I can’t repair or upgrade NT on it, apparently, because NT Setup can’t even find any hard drives. I had to stop trying, because if I don’t take a break I’ll probably end up taking a pickaxe to the thing.
This is the direct result of a power outage of about three seconds, which happened last week, hot on the heels of a whole slew of DSL connection problems. Add in the perpetual file transfer failures of unknown cause, being forbidden to send email from my main address using anything but webmail, and the black cloud of haplessness surrounding tmbg.net for the past few months, and it all totals up to a very frustrating digital experience overall. I swear, the Amish lifestyle has never looked so appealing.
you can always hook the drive up to another system and see if you can at least recover the data from there. maybe use that to reinstall NT on the drive, too.
So far I’ve been trying to avoid hardware tinkering, as I don’t have much experience with it. But maybe it’s not as onerous as I’m expecting.
What I really need is to get the NT Setup CD to recognize my drives, so it can repair the installation. The BIOS knows they’re there, and in DOS mode I can use the partitions on the master disk (but not the slave, which worries me). There has to be a way to get Setup to see them too. It needs drivers, but I don’t know where to find the right ones. Hopefully today I can find out.
On the bright side, I figure that even if I can’t get any of the files back, I’m still only looking at about 10-20% data loss, because of backups. But restoring from the backups will take several days, and does nothing to fix the server itself.