…computer woes…
I was going to write a post to say how pleased I’d been today by a couple of things.
First, I installed Xampplite and, after a couple of hours sorting out various bugs, got it fully installed as a server that I could test out various versions of WordPress on, including configuring, which I’ve been wanting to do for ages.
Then Son dropped by for a natter and revealed he’d been reading a book. Nothing startling about that, you may think. But Son has never, ever been known to ever crack open a book willingly. He has no problem reading – he is simply not interested in reading for pleasure and never has. Even as a child, I couldn’t get him interested in reading storybooks, even though he enjoyed being read to. So to hear him say he was reading something that he did’nt have to was pretty startling. And the book? It’s An Intelligent Person Guide to Philosophy” no less; Son remarked that it is “most interesting” and that he’ll probably be looking for similar books in the library.
So, I was feeling quite jolly when I sat down in front of my PC, which had been left switched on as usual. Then I found that the screen was frozen; rebooting bought the message “NTLDR is missing”.
Arghhhh. I checked all the cabling; tried booting into DOS. No luck – could not get into the C drive at all. Used the XP installation CD to check the disk it couldn’t read any of it. Tried repairing the MBR and the boot sector – no luck. Got out the laptop and searched the internet. Came to the conclusion the drive was probably FUd. But, ever hopeful, I decided not to give up on it, and instead I formatted it – luckily, I’d performed a complete backup of everything important just a few days ago. Rather mysteriously, the pre-formatting reported that the disk was full, with only 6mb free – only this morning, I’d done a disk cleanup and there was over 5gb free.

The formatting went normally. And while I’ve been writing this, WinXP has been installing. And now the install has finished, and is successful. All that remains now to to install all of my programs…… It’s going to be long night.