Holiday Computer Woes
September 2nd, 2008I’ve been away for 3 weeks on holiday, first in Denmark but I also had 12 days on Naxos in Greece. I still managed some computer time while in Denmark but the time in Greece was well away from all things on-line, it was a nice break even though it’s good to be back on-line.
My girlfriends mother has a donated PC from a company that runs Windows XP Professional, it broke completely while I was there visiting. The thing would get as far as the Windows boot screen but then crash with a blue screen of death that flashed past so quick it was impossible to read the error.
Even booting into safe mode wouldn’t work with some error about ‘file could not be read’. I suspected that the file system was somehow corrupted but trying to fix it without the original Windows disks was near impossible. All the downloads I could find to get hold of CHKDSK would require a floppy drive which the broken PC had but not my laptop that I was using to try to get the recovery software. My usual method would be to boot a live Linux CD but unfortunately there are no Linux tools to fix an NTFS partition.
Running out of time I decided to install Ubunbtu 8.04 in a dual boot set-up so at least she could get internet access. This worked fine until I had to abort a software update using synaptic that was taking too long. On next restart everything seemed fine but underneath were strangely broken, for example clicking on any menu or desktop icon did nothing at all. I’m sure this was easy to fix but I didn’t have time so unfortunately her computer is still not working. If only there was a way to remotely fix a broken PC there would be no problem.
