I had my world strapped against my back.
Jan. 26th, 2009 11:43 pmSooooo last night I got ready to do some scheduled maintenance on .moon. First thing I notice is my system clock is off by a number of hours. Bad sign, and I knew it. I should've immediately run a backup, but I'm an idiot and had too much to do, so I didn't. Bet you can see where this is going.
When I tried to get a database backup of .moon things started running really slow. My computer hadn't been rebooted in days, so I started shutting things down to reboot. Then I realized I had accidentally tried to *open* a backup of the database instead of saving it as a file. The DB is over 100 MB, so no wonder it was slow. Still, I'd closed a lot of my stuff already, so I went ahead and rebooted.
Got all the way booted up and logged back in when the computer suddenly screamed like I'd never heard anything scream before. It was like a fire alarm. Being that it was nearly midnight, I shut it off in a panic. When I turned it back on, blue screen of death.
I tried safe mode, command prompt, etc. Blue screen of death.
Fortunately, my sister's laptop was handy, so I was able to get back online and get the .moon forum out of maintenance mode. But that thing is so slow there's no point in trying to do anything with it, unless you're really nostalgic for the days of 28.8K modems. I was able to Google around a bit, and it looks like it may only be the boot sector of the drive that's gone bad, in which case it can be fixed through the recovery console. But you need a Windows XP disc to get into the recovery console, and computer manufacturers don't ship the normal OS discs with their systems anymore. I tried the recovery disc that came with the machine, but it tries to use the recovery partition, which is also a no-go.
Sigh. So I may be able to fix this, if I can get ahold of a WinXP disc, or I may have to send it in for repair (it is, thankfully, under warranty for a couple more months). Either way, I'm without a computer for at least the next several days, if not longer. Fortunately I'm working nights this week and can use the internet here, but I won't be able to do much else. And I have Ohayocon this weekend...
When I tried to get a database backup of .moon things started running really slow. My computer hadn't been rebooted in days, so I started shutting things down to reboot. Then I realized I had accidentally tried to *open* a backup of the database instead of saving it as a file. The DB is over 100 MB, so no wonder it was slow. Still, I'd closed a lot of my stuff already, so I went ahead and rebooted.
Got all the way booted up and logged back in when the computer suddenly screamed like I'd never heard anything scream before. It was like a fire alarm. Being that it was nearly midnight, I shut it off in a panic. When I turned it back on, blue screen of death.
I tried safe mode, command prompt, etc. Blue screen of death.
Fortunately, my sister's laptop was handy, so I was able to get back online and get the .moon forum out of maintenance mode. But that thing is so slow there's no point in trying to do anything with it, unless you're really nostalgic for the days of 28.8K modems. I was able to Google around a bit, and it looks like it may only be the boot sector of the drive that's gone bad, in which case it can be fixed through the recovery console. But you need a Windows XP disc to get into the recovery console, and computer manufacturers don't ship the normal OS discs with their systems anymore. I tried the recovery disc that came with the machine, but it tries to use the recovery partition, which is also a no-go.
Sigh. So I may be able to fix this, if I can get ahold of a WinXP disc, or I may have to send it in for repair (it is, thankfully, under warranty for a couple more months). Either way, I'm without a computer for at least the next several days, if not longer. Fortunately I'm working nights this week and can use the internet here, but I won't be able to do much else. And I have Ohayocon this weekend...