by Mi An » Sat Mar 24, 2007 2:27 pm
It's not exactly an installation fault, but it was dumb, and others should avoid it.
It was late, a recipe for disaster in and of itself. I had just downloaded FreshDownload (that or another download manager) so I could do one last thing before collapsing for the night. It installed, and then requested a restart. This, naturally, pissed me off. There's nothing in my machine that needs to be mucked with by software as simple as a download manager that would require a post-install restart. I hit the okay button, and then realize I'm too tired to wait for the reboot and then still finish my to-do list. But I don't want to wait for the reboot to turn off my laptop either, and I get a little madder. I press the power button, while the machine is prepping for a restart, and hold it till the machine powers off sans the shutdown.
Apparently, that's a bad time for a manual shutdown. Afterwards, no boot, bluescreen flash right before restart-cycle, and my windows CD can't even recognize the partition for a repair install. Fortunately, KNOPPIX can read the partition, and I rescued my data, but it can't write to it, and there appears to be no hope of repairing the ever finicky NTFS filesystem. I'll have to reformat and just be happy that I got my stuff back. Since I didn't have time to recover the stuff until now, I've been without my laptop for more than month.
The moral? It's not about safe booting, it's about anger. Your computer can sense anger, and even if it isn't directly focused at the machine itself, it can take it personally. If you feel your temp rising, go the extra mile and show your friend how much you care: break out that can of imported compressed air or turn up your PCs favorite Sinatra mp3. When you're good to puter, puter's good to you. When you're not, it can quickly reduce you to tears and the fetal position.
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