Recovering from a serious/scary CPU error

Thursday evening, an unfortunate thing happened. I began getting strange error messages from Windows XP after making no significant changes, the errors were so frequent and abrupt that it effectively made using the computer impractical. What I suspected immediately is probably what you'd expect from hearing that: somehow, someway, a virus has infected my laptop. To be honest, while I don't know for sure that was at least partially the case, I do know something has gone wrong inside the box.

Suddenly, Windows wouldn't boot correctly. System restore and using the last known good config wouldn't work. Since my laptop was dual booting, I figured the typical repair of the boot sector would just screw things up with my Linux partitions so I tried to just reformat my Windows partition. While I was able to do that, I simply could not reinstall XP without an error in the process. I half-expected my HD, I half expected my (admittedly) poor condition install disk. I ended up removing all my partitions, and creating a new one for the whole hard drive, running chkdsk, then having seemingly no other choice but to revert to my copy of Windows Vista I got from MSDNAA.

While I'm up and running now (this blog is being done from my laptop), I suspect damage to my Hard Drive. Obviously its not dead, but its not in prime shape, either. *sigh*, if I had the money I would've ordered a new gaming/dev laptop hours ago...but I don't. All I can do for now is look into a replacement HD for the time being.

I have to say, these past two days of recovery efforts weren't fun, and in the context of the V-Studio, it knocked me completely off track with everything on hold. Putting me behind again from where I wanted to be with preparations of the Video/Game Database development. Fortunately, I, having a huge case of HD failure paranoia I have, had pretty much everything I needed backed up on my external HD, including all the Boom Blocks source code and resources. Some notable things I did lose as I forgot to backup are all my Firefox bookmarks, a local copy of my game collection on Gamespot as well as a running list of all games i've added since then. So now I'm back to the buggy, largely inaccurate record at Gamespot.com. I didn't gripe over this too much because I fully intend to physically sort through my entire collection anyway as I will log their locations into the database.

As of this blogging, I'm still not fully recovered. I just finished installing open office and after trying to run it I was told there was some kind of error and I would need to install it again. I have yet to install Visual C++/C# 2008 Express. I have yet to install a DirectX 9 SDK so I couldn't work on Boom Blocks right now even if I wanted to. That being said, I have yet to install the .NET framework so there's nothing I can do with C#, and I'm sure there are others that I will think of in time.

Given the damage to at least some portion of my HD (i'm confident this is the case) as well as the pain in the freakin' arse efforts I made to finally get an OS to install again on it, I'm not even considering partitioning it again and dual booting with Ubuntu. It looks like its gonna be Windows Vista from here on out with this laptop. Once positive I can make after all this (minus the evident periodic extended seek times in the HD), is that, in all honestly, my laptop is running better right now than it has in a quite a darn while. Well...at least while it was in Windows - Ubuntu always ran as smooth as silk.

I can say that I have started (to a very small degree) planning the database. I honestly feel I would've been much further along in that by this time but...well, you get the idea now.

From here on out, its always gonna be at least kinda scary storing anything on this laptop, even after I get a new HD. I just hope that somehow, this laptop will last long enough until I can afford a new one somehow...its does feel good to be back, though...