Repetition
Not a day after I finish my rant on Microsoft, they struck back in the nastiest way possible: they destroyed the partition table on my hard drive. For all you out there who don’t have a clue what i just wrote, it means that while all of my information is still on my hard drive, the computer doesn’t have the slightest clue where it is, so to it, my hard drive is empty. I am currently writing this on a lab computer since mine is obviously not working.
Anyway, back to why this happened in the first place. In the process of installing Norton GoBack, you must restart your computer to finish the installation. Upon restarting, everything was looking good, the Norton GoBack splash screen came up and so did the Windows boot screen. However, a few seconds after the boot screen came up, Windows bluescreened and automatically rebooted. This had me a little worried, but it had happened before. After it did this five times in a row, I realized that something was wrong.
I booted off of the Windows XP install CD and entered the recovery console. I ran the fixmbr and fixboot commands, hoping that they would remove GoBack from startup so I could get into Windows again. When I rebooted, I got an error that NTLDR was not found and that I should press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart. NTLDR is a system file that loads Windows XP upon boot, so this was not a good sign. I rebooted with the XP CD and entered the recovery console. However, when I entered it did not ask me what Windows installation I wanted to log into. When I tried to copy ntdlr from the CD to my computer, I was told that the operation could not be performed. It turns out that the fixmbr command that I had run earlier had destroyed the partition table. Why must Microsoft make commands that say "fix" when they destroy like they did to me.
So, it will at least be Monday before my computer will be running again. Garrett is going to try to dig up some software for me that will let me recover all of my important files over the weekend. The program looks like it will take about 22 hours to run on my size hard drive Once I have copied all of my files, I get to format my hard drive and start back over again from scratch. Not fun.