Bringing back the dead- why you should not have windows.

Do not mistake me from the title. I am not waiting something scary or morbid. I shall give a walk through through my tale of woe tonight when I tried to bring back my dead hard disk to life.

It is around 3:15 AM today and I got a quiz to write tomorrow, and a train to Benguluru tomorrow to watch the match between RCB and KKR, ( we do not have the tickets for the match, one of my friends booked it a month back, got a confirmation mail and now the ticket folks tell us that the tickets are over and they will refund the money back. Yep, We are going to Benguluru determined to get the tickets somehow and drag them to consumer court if need be! That is another tale of its own. ) and Im writing a blog about a failing hard disk and my trials to bring it back to life. I do not know if I will succeed or not, but this post will sure be a dejavu to folks who have windows on their computers.

Let me first tell you the resources we have in our room. We have one desktop, old but powerful and pretty battered by the abrupt power failures we have here. Along with the desktop , we have two laptops with one running ubuntu and another on win7. The one with the win7 doesnot have a working DVD drive.

Okay, coming to the problem-simple. Pretty much what happens to every windows owner. The system crashed with the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) and refused to boot. I, having very high experience in seeing a system crash LIVE, expected that a system restore or a system repair would do the trick thinking that some boot files or the master boot file would have gone kaput.

The following will describe in detail my daunting trials from dusk to dawn to bring my beloved PC back to life,. WARNING : UNLESS YOU ARE EXTREMELY INTERESTED IN FOLLOWING MY TALE OF WOE, I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND THAT YOU CONTINUE. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Trial#1:
My PC has a ubuntu 9.04 whose grub is overwritten by the master boot file of windows after a post windows install. Ever since I used only windows, since my windows enables bridge of the broadband. connection that is connected to my computer through ethernet. I have a wireless adapter which I made into an access point. Since I have not yet figured out how to setup a bridge on linux, I have been using windows ever since. Anyway, I tried to see what happened after restart, it goes into the "use startup recovery/start windows normally" screen and it wont budge from there.

Trial#2:
After a few restarts, a little progress, now I am able to choose between the two, but if I use start windows normally, it restarts and comes back to the same page and if I use start-up repair, it does not start the start up repair.
Inference:
I guess I needed a start-up repair for start-up repair.

Trial#3:
I searched the attic for a win7 DVD and found one bakshi left after his reinstallation not a few days ago, and fired it up. My DVD drive, already being slow, needs some pushing to pick-up. So after a few ejects and pushes, its picks up the DVD and I see the yellow LED blinking in rhythm and heard the slow whirring of the DVD drive churning the disk. The windows files load and then I see the windows loading screen and then it goes to a blank screen with the no graphics extra large mouse in the middle of the screen. Thats it. Zip. It just dies there. Hard disk, and the DVD Drive.
Inference:
There could be many reasons, a faulty DVD drive or a faulty win7 DVD or a faulty hard disk or any bus/IDE errors or RAM frequency mismatch errors or something.

Trial#4:
I erased the possibility of the faulty DVD drive, since the win7 DVD booted alright.
Just to check, I fired up my ubuntu 9.10 live disk and checked. It booted easily and went into live mode like a charm.
Inference:
This narrows down my list of problems to Faulty DVD, since Ubuntu worked well. But I did not want to take chances.

Trial#5:
I borrowed a 4 GB USB drive from my neighbor and tried putting win7 into it, the procedure involved is not as straight as I thought it would be. I tried following a tutorial on net, but that did not seem feasible since it used windows based system with a functional DVD drive to take the source from. My current resources did not match with the needs so I tried searching for something else. Another tool takes the source files (either in DVD or hdd), and convert and dump them straight into a usb stick. I used that and finally ended up with a USB bootable win7. This involved considerable juggling or win7 DVD, a hard drive and a USB stick between the ubuntu and the win7 laptops. Finally when I tried booting it up, the screen goes dead at the same point as before. That black screen with the scary big mouse pointer, mocking my troubleshooting skills.
Inference:
(stumped). Need to try any external disk repair tools or another win7 disk.

Trial#6:
Downloaded an external win7 rescue disk that does the same job as the start up repair,
but did not have a disk at hand to expend, so that plan is a fail. Then started searching for another windows disk. Luckily found an old disk of mine which I burnt long ago, when win7 was released (not the RC version). I put it up, and after a few ejects and pushes finally got to see the blue screen(with flowers and leaves) of the installer. :)
Inference:
Windows sucks. ( I dint know that more was in wait for me)

Trial#7:
I slowly got the DVD drive to pick up and click the required buttons only to see that my hard disk is not detected at all in the installation window.
Inference:
Doomed. Hard-disk conked. Do not even remember what I have in there.

Trial#8:
Fired back ubuntu to let it decide if I am really doomed or not. Sadly, I did not see any hard disk drives recognised in /media folder and nothing happened when I tried searching for them. Confirming that my hard disk is doomed for sure, I fired up win7 again.
Inference:
Never misuse your hard disk. Never trust windows to give you a good time. Because it follows Murphy's law. Everything bad with a windows based machine will happen on your worst day.

Trial#9:
Installation taking place, slowly.. Installation finished, Registry updated, Performance measured and finally after taking the username and the password, I get to see the desktop.phew :)
Inference:
Back aching, Eyes burning, body sweating and hungry. Time for some maggi now.

This has been one of my worst personal experiences with a windows system. and the newer versions of windows keep piling up on my catastrophe genre tales.