Fartition woes

About a week ago my brother accidentally pressed the MediaDirect button on my DELL Inspiron instead of the power-on button and it corrupted the boot record. The system wouldn’t boot. Any amount of restart-shutdown-power-on routine couldn’t get it to boot. There was nothing I could do except maybe reinstall windows. But, during the installation I couldn’t get past the disk check routine. Each time the disk check happened, the screen would flicker for a second and out pops the bloody brilliant blue screen of death and destruction, and then the installation would abort. And an error log indicating hardware failure. There wasn’t a way to bypass the disk check, and so, no way to install windows. All my data was intact (or at least that’s what I thought) but there was no way I could get to it. 

Well, thing is, I was in the same situation a couple of months ago. Had pressed the wrong button.  After some research and several sleepless nights I’d then figured out the cause of the problem, and a way to fix it and get my laptop back to working condition. What I found out was this: DELL ships its laptops with a single big partition and a hidden partition meant for MediaDirect. If you start playing around with that one big partition and break them into chunks of your liking, it’ll wreak havoc on the boot record. Consequently rendering the MediaDirect button useless. Pressing the MediaDirect button under these circumstances would mean trouble. A lot of it! What I did was this: I booted the machine using an Ubuntu LiveCD, downloaded a disk partitioning utility called GParted, deleted my windows partition and then recreated it. Then installed windows again. It ran beautifully. I had to reinstall all my applications though. But that seemed like a minor inconvenience considering I didn’t have to delete any of my other partitions that had gigabytes of precious data on them. 

So this time around when my brother had fucked the machine up real good (or so he thought), all I did was beam at him like the benevolent Buddha and told him not to panic – been there, done that, got the t-shirt. A bloody good one at that. And at once I got down to business. It’s like this: when you know things, you get down to business right away. 

I knew that the Ubuntu LiveCD I had with me shipped with GParted, and there was no need to download it again (I didn’t know this then). With a smug that never quite left me from the time my brother came to me with his sad little plea, I booted the machine using the LiveCD and ran GParted. What I saw on the screen briefly disturbed me, the smug turned into holy shit: 232/250 GB of unallocated partition! That was impossible! I ran fdisk on the command prompt and that showed me the correct partitioning, but for some strange reason the Gparted program wouldn’t recognize any of it! Of course, I couldn’t delete the whole of 232/250 unallocated space and recreate it. That would just mean… well, simply put, fuck-all. I gave up. It wasn’t worth breaking my head on since: 1) I had a desktop at home; I could use that 2) Inertia: a shitload of it. 

The laptop lie there for days – untouched, unloved. 

And so, today, owing to some post-lunch boredom, I decided to give it a shot again. GParted was out of the question for obvious reasons. A new approach was called for.  The ‘Inspiron+MediaDirect+partition+blue+screen+error’ – whatever – searches were fruitless, because most of the help and support forums it directed to had all given their final verdict as GParted. So instead I made an attempt to go at it a little more elaborately. The first thing to do was to find a software that could diagnose partitions and give reports. A detailed report on how deep a shit I was in was probably the right way to start things. Several searches later I stumbled on Testdisk – a tool that not only analyzed your partitions and produced reports, but also lets you fix broken partitions and recover lost ones! I’m being honest here – I cried. Frankly, that was more than I could’ve expected. I instantly downloaded Testdisk and ran it. The boot record report came. Well, what do you know! Overlapping partitions, conflicting disk spaces and some real magnificent shit that I’d never even heard of! It was tremendously disturbing. It could also be the reason why GParted refused to recognize the partitions. Immediately I ran the disk analysis and deep search options in Testdisk for all my parititions. What can I say! Testdisk beautifully analyzed the partitions, made appropriate adjustments so that the overlaps were corrected, and performed several other minor background tweaks that I don’t even want to get into, but let me just tell you, they were all very minor and beautiful tweaks. Then finally, Testdisk, very politely asked me if I wanted to overwrite my partition record to the one it just now created. I said, YES! Absolutely. You’re the man and it’s your machine now. I must say though, the only remarkable contribution that Testdisk sought of me other than acknowledging the changes it made and approving them, was to mark my primary boot partition. Well, I changed it from MediaDirect to Windows and restarted the machine. VOILA! 

Best part: I didn’t have to reinstall windows! The machine looked like the way it was before the damned button was pressed. I cried again. 

Yes, I highly recommend Testdisk if you’ve managed to fuck up your partitions.  And here’s a very good how-to on Testdisk. Happy fixing!

Once again, with love

 

I’m sitting here, my stomach full, swollen, tired, and thinking. The room’s a mess. Books are piling up every place. The newspapers, cardboard boxes, perfume bottles, electronic gadgets, wires of all kind. It’s a bloody mess. I don’t notice it too often because I’m mostly at work. But on an afternoon like this, when I lie down to think, all I can see is the room and the mess. The guitars, the rusty strings, the cameras, the batteries, the countless compact discs – untouched, unclicked, unwatched, unloved. Junk. Pure junk. Piling up everywhere. One day it’ll all come crashing down with a loud noise. THUD! No one will hear the noise except me. No one will feel the earth shake under their feet except me. I’ll be buried till my head in this rust, deep inside these old yellow rotting papers and the burnt circuit boards.  Misty, stuffy, unbearable, unbreathable. Dust. Rust.

I keep thinking about the hotel rooms in the great cities of the world. Minimal furnishing and no junk. The only junk I notice are probably my own – the ones that I brought with me. I keep thinking about the expanse of the double bed and how neatly it is made to sleep on. I feel guilty about moving the sheets. There’s the TV and the remote control. A clean glass inverted and kept near a jug of clean water. A soft towel folded and scented, and a cake of nice smelling soap, smartly packed. The newness of it all. The absolute uninvolvment of the furnishing and the room itself. You love it but you don’t start loving it too much. You ought not to.  You grow bored of it by degrees and you decide to leave.  You’re always leaving. 

I want a way out of the junk that I’m so in love with. I want to wake up everyday in new places. Junkless places. And I know that’s what I want more than anything else in this world. 

Here’s to liberation.

 

I’m starting once again, with love, with sincerity.