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| Why I haven't
been on |
8/9/2003 |
| No, I haven't died, obviously. As you very well know,
the internet on the rest of my family's partition wasn't working
because of Speed Blaster, that supposedly optimized your internet
settings, was installed. A stupid "company" named Total Velocity made
it. Randy had it installed on his, too, and he somehow found some
documentation stating that if you have certain ISPs (internet
service providers), then it will cause yours to cease working, and
our ISP, Comcast, is one of them listed. My dad wouldn't let me go a
minute without making sure I was working on the computer. He needed
to use it for his business and he needed the internet and couldn't
always use mine and have me get to it for him. So basically, I had
to reformat that half of the hard drive (theirs is drive C, my half
is drive D). I went ahead and copied all the irreplaceable stuff
to my drive and proceeded to reformat the C drive and reinstalled
Windows 98. After doing so, I noticed it booted right to Windows 98
without giving the option to boot to either that or Windows XP,
meaning I couldn't get to mine. Win98 uses FAT32 (32-bit file
allocation table) and WinXP uses NTFS (NT file system). NTFS can
read FAT32 but FAT32 can't read NTFS. Since mine uses NTFS,
Win98 couldn't read it and get the data back so I had to somehow
find a way to get the boot menu restored. I searched the internet
and found out that WinXP creates the boot menu and has 2 files that
let the system read NTFS at startup. Since the C drive is the active
primary partition, it's the one that the system looks at for boot
information, so it has to have those 2 files to read NTFS (Ntldr and
Ntdetect). Once the system loads those into memory, it is able to
make use of a file called boot.ini that supplies the menu that
allows you to choose which OS (operating system) you want to use.
Those were put on the C drive when WinXP installed and were gone
now. I also found that people said it was very difficult if you
install Win98 after WinXP (I installed Win98 first when I did it the
first time). The only thing I could do was to boot to the WinXP CD
and run a program that fixes the boot sector. I did that and the
boot menu was there again and I was happy and I could boot to WinXP
now... but not Win98, which I just installed. Also, the video card was
having resource conflicts with another device so it had to use an
generic driver. When I looked into it, I discovered that it was
some system device using the resources and they weren't there
before. Then I remembered that the first time I installed them, I
didn't use the motherboard CD and I did this time, so resources were
taken up that weren't being taken up before. I uninstalled the video
card software and reinstalled it, to no avail. It was still using
the generic driver, so I removed that one and restarted, thinking
it would reinstall it and give it resources that were free. It
didn't, it just stayed gone and the screen stayed black. Wonderful.
That meant I'd have to reinstall the video card driver without a
monitor, basically. No one can do that.
After much thought, I realized that the only fix was to
buy/borrow a hard drive on which I'd installed WinXP (so it can read
both partitions) and then I'd copy the irreplaceable files to that
and reformat the drive with the blacked-out WinXP on it and
reinstall it. My dad said he'd buy one while I was at work, but that
I'd have to pay for it since I'm the one who messed it up. He didn't
get one, however, because he saw Sis. Judy there and she said she
was reformatting Bryanne's hard drive (her granddaughter) and that
we could borrow it. It turned out that hers was only 12 GB and we
need at least 20 to back up all our stuff (MP3s take up a lot,
lol). So we had to buy one, anyway, so I just went to Circuit City
and looked at their hard drives. The cheapest ones were a 40 GB one
for $80 and an 80 GB one for $110. I got the 80 GB drive since it
comes with a $50 mail-in rebate (which I'll probably procrastinate on
and forget to mail in).
I installed WinXP so I could read the stuff on the other NTFS
partition and I copied it to the Win98 FAT32 one. I might as well
make the first hard drive just one big partition with Win98 on it,
and the new hard drive have WinXP for me. After I copied the files,
I had to reformat the new hard drive with FAT32 so Win98 could read
it and copy the backup files to it and read it again once made one big partition and just put Win98 on the whole thing. So then I
did just that and had both hard drives formatted in FAT32. Since I'd have to reformat the D
drive again to put NTFS and WinXP on it, I had to copy the backup
data once again to the C drive, then I put WinXP on the D drive and
everything works fine now. So yeah, I couldn't very well be online
during all of that so I wasn't. |
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