There is nothing useful on this web site.
Even though the internet is the source of all truth, the only truth here is that everything else is a lie.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.- Oscar Wilde
No worries… it's been financed with Asset Backed Commercial Paper (ABCP)
Wow! Almost a full month since our last update. Time does fly.
The jukebox page has been a challenge. We ran out of disk drive space for songs. Attempts at repartioning the existing hard drive proved fruitless. The end solution was to simply just buy a new hard drive.
Only $90 for 250 gigabytes! It's amazing.
The new drive replaced 6 GB backup drive that was seldom used. I remember paying over three hundred dollars for that drive many years ago.
25 years back I sold SCADA systems. A 10 megabyte hard drive then was the size of a dishwasher and cost over $5,000. But that was big enough back then to record the operating setpoints of gasplant or pipeline for a couple of months.
Today, that same unit would store maybe 3 iPod tunes, and just short ones.
Messr's Fert and Grünberg certainly deserve the Nobel prize they recently won.
So, everything is going just great AND THEN …
Microsoft's lastest YAPU drops its load on my desktop and then AUTOMATICALLY REBOOTS. This is what appeared on reboot…
Only moments before the system was working fine, running in the background as a web server. I was playing some tunes from the jukebox page on my laptop. It was plugged into the stereo and connected to the web (and the desktop web server) via the wireless router.
OK, so my life is a bit complicated. Suddenly, I get a code 404
or
This can only mean one thing. Server down.
I look at the web server system. I see the Black Screen of Death. This is bad, very bad. I'm thinking disk crash. I begin to hyper-ventilate. I even try CTRL+ALT+DEL as suggested.
Of course, that action produces exact the same result, over and over again. I tear apart the machine, disconnecting and reconnecting each disk drive, trying to isolate the problem.
Every time the power is switched back on, it's the same old Black Screen of Death. There is no SAFE BOOT option. There are no options at all!
After collecting my wits, I manage to find my original XP Homeless Edition Installation CD. It's about 6 years old, made before there were any Service Packs around. The laptop is still working and connected to the internet, so I set about googling for clues. I remembered what kind of motherboard was installed so I was able to look up how to access up the system BIOS (it has been several years - I had forgotten how).
I was then able to configure the system to boot off the CD-ROM drive with the XP installation disk. I disconnected the internet to prevent any viruses from downloading. This has happened to me once before; but only once.
After booting up in SAFE mode from the CD, I was able to view both hard drives on the system using assorted DOS commands. To my relief, both drives seemed to be working OK and everything seemed to be there. There was however, one thing seriously out of whack.
It seems that my XP Homeless Edition operating system had somehow mixed up the C: and D: disk drives!
I later determined that Security Update for Windows Internet Exploder KB939653 had automatically downloaded and installed itself, and then REBOOTED the computer. Somehow the D: drive became the C: drive and vis-versa. When no operating system could be found on the C: drive, the dreaded Black Screen of Death appears.
I googled for clues as to what had just happened here. Apparently, others have had this misfortune before. As usual, the Microsoft MSDN network has many pages of useless documentation on how to NOT remedy this problem.
There were other web pages that offered clues to solving the problem, some with utilities that could be downloaded (thanks, but no thanks!). Some DOS commands could run in SAFE mode (ie, FDISK and DISKPART) and offered more clues and things to try but did not ultimately solve the problem.
Here is what I eventually discovered and did.
There were 3 files missing from the root of the C: drive that were on the C: drive of my laptop - boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com. I copied these files from my laptop using the CD burner on the laptop and the CD reader on the desktop. It was a royal pain-in-the-ass to do this. In the end it made no difference.
The system was still confused about which was C: and which was D:
Then I then copied the same three files to root of the D: drive. The system booted from the hard disk. I logged in. The desktop appeared! It was magic! And there was rejoicing throughout the land!
There was still a problem however. Windows XP was now running from the D: drive.
Since all the software on this computer is configured to run from the C: drive, none of the applications worked anymore! All I saw was the stupid flashlight icon seaching for stuff that was supposed to be on the C: drive but now actually resided on the D: drive, which was the disk drive formerly known as C: (the hardware - cables and disk drives were now reconnected in their original configuration).
After several more hours of dicking around, I finally managed to get everything working correctly by altering the boot partition information in the boot.ini on the c: drive file using notepad as an editor and the DOS attrib command to set/reset the file attributes.
Of course none of this came easily, and I still cannot explain what happened here, but by the end of the day, everything was back to normal and working as it should be. Nothing was lost but time itself.
This drama played itself out on Oct 11 starting at 9:10am right after the Security Update for Windows Internet Exploder KB939653 YAPU dropped its load and rebooted the computer.
In writing this blog, and following up on some of the useful information I found on the web that day, I came across a new MSDN bulletin that addressed this very same problem, in addition to the others that were posted previously.
It is dated October 15, 2007, a few days after I experienced the Black Screen of Death. Coincidence? Maybe. But I am guessing that a few others may have had the same experience as me that day.
The reasons Microsoft give for this event occuring are pure bullshit as far as my system was concerned. But this comes as no surprise.
I swear, this is be my last Windows system.
And Vista will never darken this horizon.