The Crash aka The Lame Weekend

So... my computer broke this last Saturday. I let a process run away with memory, use up all my paging file, so the computer froze. I turned it off, but when I turned it back on, it couldn't find a bootable disk. Uh oh. I had had this problem a few (three?) times before, and fixed it easily enough. Except this time I couldn't do my usual thing. I couldn't attach another XP drive and boot to it because I didn't have one. In this past this has fixed the problem, which I think was a problem with the NTFS log file (it's a journaling system, so if the journal was corrupted, it would need fixing). Since I didn't have a drive, I tried to find someone who did. The closest I came was Lee, who was kind enough to drive over a Windows XP cd so I could run rescue disk. Yay! After 6 hours of chkdsk on Sunday, I finally tried various combinations of fixboot and fixmbr. Still, the BIOS wouldn't boot to the hard disk. I finally tried to tell it to manually boot from the drive, and voila! Success. Quite odd. I still don't have it recognizing the drive and auto-booting, but it will successfully boot if I tell it to manually. Quite odd. Maybe the drive/partition isn't marked as bootable or something. I'll fiddle with it more once I get to Seattle and have my other machine to help out.

So, the moral of the story is, Alden had a lame weekend. Ross was gone on Saturday and Monday, though he did hang out with me while I tried to fix it on Sunday. None of the nVidians were around for fun and games, so I didn't get any social activity. Garrett's moved out, so I can't hang with him. I spent Saturday and Monday playing Oblivion. It was fun, but I'm leaving, and I'd rather hang with cool people than play games. Sunday I fixed my computer, but mostly waited and watched, like, 10 episodes of Deep Space Nine. Fun, but a bit much for one day. It's not like a new Sci Fi show, I've seen these before, and they're entertaining and enjoyable, but not really fantastically fascinating.