Why do I kid myself? I feel like my Fate is pretty much sealed, yet I’d rather not accept it.

But, here goes my chronicle…

There comes a time in a user’s life when he gets sick of seeing menus come up for things that no longer exist on his machine, i.e., the Microsoft OS Loader, which had essentially taken over my bootsector without ever asking, good thing I’ve been using loadlin.

So on the net, I see some simple advice. Delete all the files associated with NT, especially those hidden secret ones. Done. I should have realized that something was missing…. I get treated to a new error message, one that I’ve never seen before.

Cannot find NTLDR. Please insert another disk.

Let this be a lesson to…

1. Always have a blank floppy!!! This is almost as useful as a towel.

1. Have a boot disk that actually starts the OS you are using.

2. Copy all numbers down. In this case, specifically, the cylinder boundaries of all your partitions.

   That’s the lovely thing about self-inflicted crashes… it’s always something new…. At least I didn’t have to hand edit the partition tables like last time. And this is only because I have Linux, without which I would certainly be screaming into the void and curing Bill G. back to the Hell whence he was spawned.

   I suppose [the next point should be]…

3. …always have a rescue disk, preferrably two, or better still, more.

This is precisely why I brought two machines with me. If I only had one and it went down, I would be sorely screwed, especially here where I am probably at least 30 minutes away from a decent motherboard (barring theft… they’ve got nice systems in the [computer lab at school], horribly scarred by NT, however.) Never again will I curse civilization. Internet access proved key. I downloaded this Linux util called fixtables or some such thing, booted in with a Red Hat rescue disk, ran it, and got C: back up (but not booting.) BTW, what the coup de grâce of my crash was dding what looked like a bootsector [image] to the bootsector, munching the partition table.

I then changed Linux’s fdisk to tweak the cylinder boundaries and fix the extended DOS partition. Since I was lucky to have a Win 95 bootdisk, I was able to do an fdisk /mbr and then I set the active partition. Voilà! I finally got rid of all traces of NT. Ironically, it also trashed my Slackware partition, leaving me with only Win 98. The price to pay, I suppose. I swear it’s a foretelling. I don’t dare run scandisk and shutdown still stalls. Oh well. If [the Debian install discs] comes before the week is over, I’ll check it out. Or maybe I’ll install Slackware 4.0.