Apr
30
2007

Bye Chimera

When Windows XP Goes Bad

Monday, April 30, 2007 - 10:40:44 pm
(Posted Under: Geek)
How badly can Windows XP fuck up? Pretty badly is the answer to that one!

Two weeks ago while trying to image some hard drives (mistakenly telling acronis to split files at 4500 bytes, rather than 4.5GB - which certainly makes for an interesting root directory in C:\) the power supply in chimera gave out. Well, actually acronis at some point failed to access the disk it was writing to. Rebooting to XP was a no go - "Cannot read disk" - or some such junk. A little while after, the cause became obvious - the power supply, which gave up a little later on (and would not spin the disk up properly).

After days of scrambling to backup all my data, combined with the full day it took to scandisk / restore the thousands of files acronis had created right before the crash, things were looking better, in that I still had my data - although it seemed touch and go for a day or too. After the emergancy backup I got another drive to do a dd with, to make sure I really didn't loose anything.

At the end of last week I picked up a pair of 320GB SATA drives for my Linux server - after a close call (which turned out fine with regards to data recovery), it was time to set up a RAID 1 array for my data. I should have done this ages ago (especially since I needed new disks for space anyway), this close call was enough of a push to get me to do it.

With those online, it was then time to dd the backup disk into a loop file, which I know had the space to store. Got that happening over the weekend, and having access to my data (without needing to have the backup drive online) was really nice.

As of last night, I then decided to dd the disk onto a virtual machine, at least to get chimera running (in a virtual machine at least) one last time - and to try and work out / fix the Windows XP installation on it, if indeed it still didn't work. In this way, being able to screw around in the virtual machine, not effecting 1) the original disk 2) the backup disk or 3) the loop file on my server. Because after all, despite having a new machine ordered, what was chimera may still work, just that XP won't boot because of some corruption somewhere.

Firstly, the only way I could think to copy the loop file to a VMware disk was dd over ssh. Let me say that gzipping it on the fly (in an attempt to get around the 100MB/s network bottleneck (which frustratingly was an emulated bottleneck, as the destination virtual machine was running on the same actual machine that the loop file source was on). Mental note to self - don't do that again, live with 4Mb/s network transfers. While I thought the CPU on my server would handle the compression and uncompression of the disk image efficently, it actually took way longer than just sending the file raw with the network bottleneck. You live and learn.

In anycase, tonight I've tried to get that installation of XP to boot (within VMware). Fucked it I can though! Nothing I've tried (including all combinations of repair commands in Repair Console, rewriting the MBR from a working XP install, copying ntdlr and related from a working XP install) has any affect. No matter what I've tried, after post, the disk does some activity and then just sits there at a blank screen - which incidently further suggests to me that chimera not booting could just be an XP thing, not a hardware thing.

But in anycase, it's pretty scary to me just how foobar an installation of Windows XP can get! I've buggered some Linux installs in my time, none of which have been hard to get working again - but Windows XP, it's anyone's guess.

At the end of the day I have all my data (and access to any file from that installation), and that's what counts, but still, I'm kinda alarmed by how bad Windows XP can go. Which is certainly one reason why all my data is going to be on a Linux drive / machine frow on.

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