My last tweet was “That’s it! Fuck Windows! I’m rebooting in[to] Ubuntu!”  That was, in the words of the old saying, “Nine hours ago.”

I rebooted into Ubuntu to try to fiddle with WiFi again.  Couldn’t get it to work.  “So,” I thought, “I’ll go back to Windows 7, research, get any files/drivers I may need, then reboot into Ubuntu, copy the stuff from the NTFS partition, and I’m good to go!”

Um, no.  A Facebook-distributed virus bricked my Windows installation.  Hardcore.  I’m almost certain, upon research, that this was the cause.  “So, OK,” I thought.  “I’ll go to the library, do the research there, burn any files I might need onto a CD-R, and go home and do the Ubuntu thing that way.”  That wouldn’t fix the Windows problem, but, as I wrote (poetically) before, “Fuck Windows!”

Um, no.  I found what I needed, yes.  I burned it onto a CD-R, yes.  I brought it home, yes.  But my notebook doesn’t ship with an optical drive and my external drive — well, doesn’t work.  At all.  Ubuntu can’t see it, the BIOS can’t see it.  I feel lucky that I can see it.  It’s black and opaque, so that helps.

So I used F8 to boot into the Windows restore partition to try to repair, and:

Um, no.  The “repair” failed.  I think this is because I resized the partition.  So the only option was to rewrite the Windows partition (fortunately I can do that rather than wipe the whole disk).  So I started it going, glancing at it occasionally, and then decided to — um, go build Rome.  WTF?  The reinstallation took approximately 14 of the nine hours.  In the last stages, the Toshiba and Best Buy software was installed, which, frankly, is a metric ton of malware.  OMFG.  It interrupts one’s work, spies on the user, reports stuff to who-knows-whom.  But I got it going again, after the so-many hours.

But, of course (“of course”?) my MBR had been rewritten by the reinstallation.  So I can’t load Ubuntu any longer.

But, OK, that’s cool!  Now all I have to do is download a Karmic USB live image and boot off that!

Um, no.  Can’t find my frakking USB key, the reason for which is likely related to what I plan to be the next post.  The one avec much hilarity.

So I went looking for a way to reinstall GRUB or lilo from Windows.  This is: well, somewhere between “I haven’t figured out how to do it” and “Fucking impossible”.  I’m leaning towards the latter, as all of the utilities I’ve found are x86, and I’m in 64-bit Windows. 

So (another “so”) I’m going to try to do it through Wubi, which I have essentially-zero confidence will work.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying: I may disappear.  For a long time.  Especially if Windows gets hosed again.  And the cheapest fix may be to go buy another USB key tomorrow.  And a big part of this problem — not all, but much — is a virus.  Infecting Windows 7.  Distributed via Facebook.  #FAIL

Please email me any luck you may have lying about.  Not that I’m guaranteed to be able to check my email in finite time.

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:02:21 +0000
Under computing
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