Crawling Back…

Once in a while, along comes an unanticipated event that tends to turn your life upside down.

i.e. Win XP

Anyway, this is a continuation of El Caramba. Well, there were several ways I tried to repair Windows. Firstly, I had recently read some reports on PCWorld about how some PCs were refusing to boot after having SP3 installed. There was one case which might have concerned me…

It was a case when gdi32.dll was missing from system32, or something. It requires booting using the WIndows Recovery CD, and then copying the file. Pretty easy. Except I had lost my CD. So, I tried replacing the file with a few versions that I had got from the internet. Well, the first time I tried to replace the file, it gave me the error which people were complaining of, a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). I, till then, had been having the problem of just the mouse appearing on the screen.

I tried 4 other versions of gdi32.dll, all of which gave me the mouse and blank screen. Thus, I concluded that my problem must be different.

Then, I went to Microsoft’s Support site, and found out the instructions for uninstalling SP3 manually. For this I required the Recovery CD, which I got from a friend of mine. Even though it wasn’t original, I could use the Recovery Console without problems. I logged onto the Recovery Console, and navigated to the directory called $ServicePackUninst$ in my system32 folder. Then, there is a text file called spuninst.txt inside a sub-folder. I used a command called ‘batch’, which runs all the commands inside the text file at once. It was basically deleting all the SP3 files and restoring the SP2 files. I noticed while deleting, it came across a number of file not found errors, this meaning that SP3 wasn’t properly installed.

Unfortunately, it still didn’t work.

So, then I resigned myself to my fate. I would have to reinstall Windows. But I knew that reinstalling Windows would make Linux temporarily inoperable. Installing Windows would install the Windows Bootloader onto the MBR. A bootloader is the stuff that tells your PC where all the operating systems are located. The MBR stands for Master Boot Record. It’s that very minute part of the hard disk where the bootloader is stored. Well, when I installed Linux, which was after I installed Windows, it loaded it’s own bootloader onto the MBR. But it automatically detected Windows installed and I didn’t have to manually configure anything. However, the Windows bootloader wasn’t willing to share any space. So I knew that I would have to boot Ubuntu from the Live CD, and re-install GRUB (that’s the Linux bootloader), onto the MBR. I’ll get to that later.

Back to reinstalling Windows. I went through the normal process, waiting for it to load the Windows Executive, drivers and all that. Then I selected a new installation of Windows on C:. Setup said that it could try to repair Windows, and I tried that. It copied the files onto the hard drive, just like a normal Windows installation. However, 5 files were missing, but I don’t think that they were very important. The CD was scratched, I guess.

Then i restarted my PC. Same error. Only mouse.

I got mad…

Then I did a fresh install of Windows. Heck, I was so pissed, that I formatted C drive. It had nothing of great importance. All my files, music, movies, program files and games were on other partitions. The only problem would be the fact that I would lose my registry, where certain settings about the OS and program files are stored. I backed up my Documents and Settings folder into my Linux partition.

Then I formatted C: and installed Windows. I tried to put in my original license key, but it rejected the key. So, I had to use the pirated key. Hmm…I’ll try to get another CD of Windows, original that is.

Well, after installing Windows, I installed drivers, relocated the My Document’s folders for all users to the correct places, and then proceeded to reinstall some other software to re-register them in the Windows Registry.

Next, I’ll try to get the Documents and Settings folder back and restored, and also get Linux back and working. Next post.

P.S. While I was writing this post, WordPress auto-saved the draft quite a number of times at <some minute>:42 seconds!