Yesterday, ahhh… Heroes season 1 final episode - “how to stop an exploding man”. When I got back to home from exhausted exam paper and a exhausted journey about 3 hours(Colombo to Ratnapura), my brother had almost downloaded it. However, after all who want to watch heroes final episode in small 14″ laptop screen. So, I plugged in my laptop to TV and boot it.

But as usual, when I’m trying to do something, Windows didn’t work. So, I tried fixing that. After lots and lots of fixing, I got it to boot, and when I played heroes sounds didn’t work. So, what to do - I restarted the computer again. Unfortunately, windows is not working again. It says “system32/config/system” file is missing.. ahhh!! That file is always important (lol.. if you are not sure what I’m talking about, read my previous post).

As you have already guessed, now windows doesn’t even boot in safe mode. So, I put a windows professional CD and tried to go to recovery console. No! No! It’s not a pirate version :). I got an original CD for selecting for second round in imagine cup web development (I also didn’t believe what I’m seeing when I first saw that.. So, no need to read that sentence again ;-)). However, recovery console was very helpful : It said “There are no hard disks present”.. whoah!! Cool, isn’t it? Actually, later on I found out I have to disable “Native SATA support” in bios in order to run the windows setup.

Anyway, since I didn’t released that SATA thing before, I rebooted in linux again to check whether I can find an old “system” file and replace the corrupted one. Thanks to my genius mind, System Restore is disabled and I had no copies of the “system” file left. So, I got one from the “windows/repair” and replace it(Thank you ntfs-3g). I could not stop just by just replacing that, I had to replace all the config files SAM, SECURITY, etc.

So, when I rebooted windows again, it worked perfectly, I was damn happy and got prepared to watch heroes. Oh!! Who is “Owner”?? instead of booting my normal user account, it booted to something called “Owner”.. oh!! Shit.. everything in the registry is gone.. How did I miss the fact “system” file is the registry? Anyway, I hope it’s ok and start installing drivers again. Actually, all driver files were in the system32 folder, so I just had to buzz the system to reinstall the drivers. Now, everything is ready, and I started installing software. Crap!! Even though everything seems fine, nothing works correct. It goes into an endless loop, which doesn’t even use my resources. It’s really annoying because usually when your computer is stuck, it uses your CPU power, uses your memory etc.. Then, I know something is going on, and be patience. But now, when I start an application, it just doesn’t show anything.

Okay.. Heroessss….. I can’t wait, and I also want to watch it in a 29. So, I got my hammers, knifes, etc ready and booted linux to see whether I can get the S-Video output working. And I never though this would be this much easier. Screw the hammers and knifes, you just a need a small blade(I think not even that if you are running feisty fawn - Not so sure, have to try that out). I just had to edit the “xorg.conf” file and put an option called “MonitorLayout” to “TV” in the “Device”. That’s all, I ran a “sudo killall gdm” and again a “sudo gdm”, it worked perfectly. (Yes, I know that you can do all that by one click in windows, but imagine getting your TV output works with windows generic drivers, you must be kidding).

And after all, happily ever after, Nathen and Peter stopped the bomb(If you want a detailed description on what happened read Kasun’s post).

After few more hours of installing windows and messing up with the drivers, I got windows running again. After all, how can I goe my ADSL to modem to work in linux?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 11:04 am and is filed under Linux, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.