I knew there was a reason why I went to uni

More workstation woes over the past few days at work. It seemed that I have been doing nothing but fixing people's machines over the last week.

The machine that wouldn't boot into windows after I've put down the ghost image, well it's finally working. After two calls to operations and two support calls from the vendor (which involved two changes to the hard disk, and a brand new motherboard), the machine just won't boot from C:\.

Having exhausted all our options, I decided to try and install the OS from a CD. After the first few screens, fragments of my ITN533 practical sessions just popped out of nowhere and told me to poke around in the recovery console. The system files seem to be there and look alright, so the image should have gone down ok. Then a whole heap of words came into mind, like ntldr, boot.ini, fixboot, fixmbr... I don't really remember what they are, but I get a pretty good idea from their names. Eventually I tried fixmbr and got asked the usual "are you sure you want to do this" question. Well the machine wasn't doing much anyway so it was worth a try. Ran with it and rebooted and it worked, just like that! It was a big relief as I no longer have the contractor scavenging for a computer everyday.

So I didn't waste my time at uni after all, that going to uni wasn't just a social exercise. I actually did learn something and remembered what I learnt.