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captainsblogI've been reading Steve Jobs's biography, which includes several Special Guest Villain appearances from his lifelong competitor. Here's the latest in our never-ending saga to deal with the horrors of the Windowverse.
Eleanor's been having computer problems. Last week, it was application software, which just decided to die following a power loss. It took two days of fighting with Adobe over getting a reauthorized install of an expensive piece of photo software which we already own, followed by another evening of hellishness with Toshiba hardware when it decided to stop recognizing her CD/DVD drive. Ol' Bill must have felt left out of the party, because this morning it was a Windows boot issue. No Welcome, no da-duh-da-DING!, nothing but that endless parade of squares moving across the rectangle on the bottom of the screen.
Yeah, that one. So once again, it's under the hood to try to figure out the fix.
Why, yes, Vista does come with a built-in recovery tool. Not the manufacturer disk that, if you can find it, and if it still reads, and if the drive still writes, will do a clean reinstall and wipe out everything on your hard drive, but a targeted diagnostic. Googling revealed what I needed quite quickly: The Windows Vista DVD has a “recovery center” that provides you with the option of recovering your system via automated recovery (searches for problems and attempts to fix them automatically), rolling-back to a system restore point, recovering a full PC backup, or accessing a command-line recovery console for advanced recovery purposes.
Perfect! Also? Not free. It used to be, but Microsoft imposed "licensing restrictions" on their redistribution of a program that everybody- repeat after me- ALREADY HAS.
So, now madder than ever at these jamoches, I decided to try duplicating that content from my own still-working (knocks on plastic) Vista computer to create such a disk. And there are many free copies of the simple little 188K file for this purpose.
The file replaces one already on your c: drive, and that file is locked down tighter than Fort Fucking Knox. You have to go through a labyrinth of permissions and administrator tools and down Control Panel dead-ends to be able to execute the file to create the magical recovery disk. Yet somehow I did it.
Once I did succeed at the task, though? There was still the process of creating the disk. And I'm not going to cut these two screens. You have to see them in all their clusterfudgery glory.
First, note that this part of the drill starts at Step 15. One through 14 took longer than the entire Easter Sunday service we didn't go to, in part, as a result of all this. Yet don't get fixed on that. Read the two Microsoft-generated screens, which appear, in order:
Let's take that again, very slowly. Step 16 tells you that your proggie will "restore your computer using system recovery options if you do not have a Windows installation disc," and Step 17 immediately prompts you for.... the installation disc.
And you Atheists think Easter is fucked up?
So anyway. On with-a the show:
At this point, I just surrendered and paid Bill his gorram license fee for the burnable copy of the thing not requiring the not-required disks. (Yes, I do have both of my original Toshiba disks. No, Windows didn't accept either of them.) Then I went through the exercise of buring this content through Nero into a CD-readable form on a bootable CD disc. And for the past hour, Eleanor's computer has read it, actually told me to press any key to boot from it (Homer: "Which one's the 'any' key?"), loaded files, briefly displayed the rectangles, went blank, and produced an arrow.
And there it remains. Is it fixing things behing the scenes? Is it fighting with something? NFI. I'm just leaving it to cook or whatever it's doing for the afternoon while I tangle with wisteria and NPR programs (and get to the damn gym before 2, at least, to work these frustrations out into calories burned).
Yet if anything good can come out of this, maybe, it's for you.
Since I went and paid for something I already own multiple inaccessible copies of, the least I can do is offer it to you, dear reader, for a fraction of what I paid. A fraction that will invoke a "divisible by zero" error in one or more of your spreadsheet apps. I'd suggest burning it and burying it until needing it. As for Bill Gates, I'd much prefer to dump him in the Thames right now:
Windows Vista 32-bit recovery disk in .iso format
Clicky that and it will download. Clicky again once downloaded and it should automatically activate your burning program to put it on a CD (least it SAYS it'll go onto a CD; maybe it has to be a DVD; dipped if I know).
Eleanor's been having computer problems. Last week, it was application software, which just decided to die following a power loss. It took two days of fighting with Adobe over getting a reauthorized install of an expensive piece of photo software which we already own, followed by another evening of hellishness with Toshiba hardware when it decided to stop recognizing her CD/DVD drive. Ol' Bill must have felt left out of the party, because this morning it was a Windows boot issue. No Welcome, no da-duh-da-DING!, nothing but that endless parade of squares moving across the rectangle on the bottom of the screen.
Yeah, that one. So once again, it's under the hood to try to figure out the fix.
Why, yes, Vista does come with a built-in recovery tool. Not the manufacturer disk that, if you can find it, and if it still reads, and if the drive still writes, will do a clean reinstall and wipe out everything on your hard drive, but a targeted diagnostic. Googling revealed what I needed quite quickly: The Windows Vista DVD has a “recovery center” that provides you with the option of recovering your system via automated recovery (searches for problems and attempts to fix them automatically), rolling-back to a system restore point, recovering a full PC backup, or accessing a command-line recovery console for advanced recovery purposes.
Perfect! Also? Not free. It used to be, but Microsoft imposed "licensing restrictions" on their redistribution of a program that everybody- repeat after me- ALREADY HAS.
So, now madder than ever at these jamoches, I decided to try duplicating that content from my own still-working (knocks on plastic) Vista computer to create such a disk. And there are many free copies of the simple little 188K file for this purpose.
The file replaces one already on your c: drive, and that file is locked down tighter than Fort Fucking Knox. You have to go through a labyrinth of permissions and administrator tools and down Control Panel dead-ends to be able to execute the file to create the magical recovery disk. Yet somehow I did it.
Once I did succeed at the task, though? There was still the process of creating the disk. And I'm not going to cut these two screens. You have to see them in all their clusterfudgery glory.
First, note that this part of the drill starts at Step 15. One through 14 took longer than the entire Easter Sunday service we didn't go to, in part, as a result of all this. Yet don't get fixed on that. Read the two Microsoft-generated screens, which appear, in order:
Let's take that again, very slowly. Step 16 tells you that your proggie will "restore your computer using system recovery options if you do not have a Windows installation disc," and Step 17 immediately prompts you for.... the installation disc.
And you Atheists think Easter is fucked up?
So anyway. On with-a the show:
At this point, I just surrendered and paid Bill his gorram license fee for the burnable copy of the thing not requiring the not-required disks. (Yes, I do have both of my original Toshiba disks. No, Windows didn't accept either of them.) Then I went through the exercise of buring this content through Nero into a CD-readable form on a bootable CD disc. And for the past hour, Eleanor's computer has read it, actually told me to press any key to boot from it (Homer: "Which one's the 'any' key?"), loaded files, briefly displayed the rectangles, went blank, and produced an arrow.
And there it remains. Is it fixing things behing the scenes? Is it fighting with something? NFI. I'm just leaving it to cook or whatever it's doing for the afternoon while I tangle with wisteria and NPR programs (and get to the damn gym before 2, at least, to work these frustrations out into calories burned).
Yet if anything good can come out of this, maybe, it's for you.
Since I went and paid for something I already own multiple inaccessible copies of, the least I can do is offer it to you, dear reader, for a fraction of what I paid. A fraction that will invoke a "divisible by zero" error in one or more of your spreadsheet apps. I'd suggest burning it and burying it until needing it. As for Bill Gates, I'd much prefer to dump him in the Thames right now:
Windows Vista 32-bit recovery disk in .iso format
Clicky that and it will download. Clicky again once downloaded and it should automatically activate your burning program to put it on a CD (least it SAYS it'll go onto a CD; maybe it has to be a DVD; dipped if I know).
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no subject
Date: 2012-04-09 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-09 02:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-09 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-09 09:11 pm (UTC)I mean, since you're going to be futzing around in your computer's innards all the time, why not do it with a free OS?
Yeah, there's a reason my kind were burned at the stake in less tolerant ages...