It Hurts Us! Blink Blink!Boy Do I Feel Stupid!

To update everyone on my computer woes, last night I went ahead and flashed my BIOS; I’ll try almost anything at this point. Still no Windows load, just that blinking cursor mocking me.

Okay, so I break down and get onto Dell Technical Support chat again. The chap runs me through different things ruling out possible problems; been there, done that! Anyway, we get to the point where he tells me the only possible problem is my hard drive boot sector and we need to reset it and repartition the drive.

But… but… but…. I already tried a different hard drive and it still didn’t work so it couldn’t possibly be a problem with the hard drive. Besides, even though I backed up the most critical data from that drive (see, it works), it would still be a pain in the ass to replace all the stuff that I was not able to backup.

Oh well, I caved in and went ahead and did what he requested. I fixed the boot sectors and then unpartitioned the drive. *cry* After the repartitioning and reformatting of the drive (which took 2 hours), I proceeded to install a fresh copy of Windows XP.

Well shiver me timbers, it worked! Windows loaded!

Now my brain starts to go into a logic loop with smoke coming out of my head. It made no sense! I already ruled out the hard drive issue. Now it works?! If the second hard drive didn’t work and the first one worked after it didn’t work, then the second one should have worked but didn’t while the first one didn’t but did… error… error… error… does not compute.

Meanwhile, the smoke detector in my place went off when my head caught fire and exploded.

Enter today. As far as I can figure, there is was sleight oversight on my part. I think that the second hard drive was not formatted with a boot sector (no OS originally on it) so the only way for one to be written is to reformat the drive and then install the OS; I did not do this. At least that’s my guess.

SO! Tonight, I get the fun task of reinstalling the software and trying to get the damn thing back onto my network.

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When you have a nice bonfire going, jump in the middle of it and warm yourself up.