You’ll soon learn to tell the difference between us two on this blog. I, Malachai, will sound mostly like an idiot, (however an idiot with somewhat of a knowledge about computer-related things.) Weasel, on the other hand, sounds much more intelligent in his style of writing. (Don’t beleive me? Check out his personal blog!) Typically I’m the one that tries new things, though, including setting up Wordpress. I’ve gotten quite adept at it over the past few days, but I digress. Given that this is the first post on a technology blog, I’ve decided to open it with a little bit about current “issues”.

Bootloaders suck.

Today, Weasel (with some encouraging, for which I feel horribly sorry,) decided to dual-boot his old HP laptop. Windows 2000 Professional, which he already had, and Xubuntu 8.10. The Xubuntu installer is (usually) particularly nice, given that it gives you the option to resize existing partitions, in order to make room at the end of the drive for a new partition. So, new partition created, and a swap space allocated, he hit the “go, baby, go” button. The installer took quite a while, seemingly doing nothing, and seemed to be fine, up until it decided to start being an idiot. For some strange reason, the installer decided, somehow, that GRUB was not a good thing to install on to the harddrive, along with some other files, so when the computer was restarted, the poor thing couldn’t find an OS. Any OS. Not Windows or linux were working. The installer deleted the Windows bootloader, and attempted to install GRUB over it, which failed, leaving the system completely unbootable. Time to dig out “Ye Olde Win2k Disque”. Yay recovery mode. Right? Wrong. We ran all of the things that it is possible to use to fix the bootloader. Fixmbr failed, along with fixboot. We then ran chkdsk /r, which should, in theory, find and restore bad sectors on the drive. After all of this, the thing was still unbootable.

Finally, Weasel decided to just re-install Win2k right over the copy that was already on the drive, and in doing so, was able to save all of his important files. Music, pictures and games.

To make a long story short, I’ll say this once again: Bootloaders suck.