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I am now impressed

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by slayer_

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We all hear about XP sucking and XP instability, but I myself have never seen huge epic failures from XP. Until now. This my friends, is what happened after the restart required for the install of IE7.
http://trevorsarchives.selfip.net/funpics/images/IE7Killer.JPG

That is not gibberish folks, it literally means a FONT (OH DEAR GOD NO) is missing and now the system can't boot. Safemode, command prompt, nothing, dead in the water.

Anyways I have since replaced the missing font (Hirens rules) but it now just sits endlessly loading at the loading XP screen, does appear to be thrashing away at the hard drive and the network, but doesn't seem to be doing anything.

So now it just sits around looking like this.... ah the irony.
http://trevorsarchives.selfip.net/funpics/images/ie7killitdrevil.JPG

Ok, so back to hirens, run a chkdsk /R. now I am completely impressed. It finds something like half the fonts files are orphaned. But even better, 8 bad clusters were found. HOW THE HECK IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE, ITS A FAKE HARD DRIVE!!!

Ok, everything is booting fine now. Though now both MSN and Avira seem to think I am running Windows Vista and require updates...... right.....

This is fun!

16 replies

by seanferd

That is, if one can get scandisk or chkdsk to run without a failure notice in the first place.

Oh noes! Dirty! Mounted!

by slayer_

What is stupid however is that it couldn't run on its own cause of these missing fonts.

I had to run the chkdsk VIA Hirens MiniXP.

by seanferd

That is impressive, indeed. Why would the install orphan fonts? And why would a missing font, let alone vgaoem.fon, kill the boot process thus?

by slayer_

Though it appears the host drive had bad clusters in that VM HDD, that probably caused it. I am now seeking warranty on that LaCie HDD. It's not even a year old and has never actually moved, it should not have bad clusters already.

by the scummy one

and XP seems to get bigger and buggier constantly.

A co-worker installed IE8 last weekend, and spent over a day trying to get the system back :0

Yesterday I installed Vista on a system (image) and after the install it boots into recovery mode and couldnt find files :0 -- re-image -- no problems (yet).

Last night I went to test McAfee Endpoint Protection on my system. I backed up my system first (but was too lazy to image it -- yes, bad move). XP installed it just fine, I rebooted -- blackness arose. Nothing 'cept HDD activity. After 10 miserable minutes of waiting, I rebooted again -- this time it booted, but everything was messed up (display settings, desktop). I was going to run the full disk encryption overnight on my primary XP system, but now I am just gonna remove it, and setup a test system. Even though the data is backed up. I cant afford to spend a day trying to put my main system back online to full capacity.

Anyway -- this is not too uncommon, as MS wants to transition peoples to Vista/Win 7, XP seems to be getting more and more buggy, and lots of updates that cause instability.

by the scummy one

many a time I have had to rebuild the Fonts folder to boot a system. Many times it was after an update or installation (mostly NT4, Win 98).

by slayer_

The drive is pretty much always with activity, I've probably filled and emptied that drive 3 times now. It often takes the brunt of my backups, and holds all my movies and TV shows.

Now I gotta backup everything to my 8 and 6 year old drives, and maybe some DVD's thrown in. Might have to use my servers 15 year old drive as well.

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