Ocean Travel Without a Boat
…Because otherwise there’s no challenge.
I’ve known my OS drive was dying for some time now, which was one of the reasons I transferred my user directory to my 1TB drive when I bought it. However, I had not anticipated the possible effects of a slowly-failing hard drive on trying to burn a DVD- namely, that it is impossible. This led me to (erroneously) believe that perhaps my DVD drive was at fault. So I decided to flash its firmware.
While normally a routine process (dl update, run, restart, poof), flashing firmware does depend on nothing going wrong during the process, as it is writing to the memory on the device itself, and without the proper contents in that memory, the device is about as useful as a brick. When you operating system freezes for 20 seconds, several times in every five-minute period, due to CRC errors from the hard drive… it does not do nice things to the contents of your RAM, and therefore also horribly abuses all running applications.
So of course, the flash failed. And failed. And failed. Which meant that while I could at least boot from a linux liveCD or something earlier, now I couldn’t boot from ANY CD or DVD. Oops. Now not only did I need to reinstall the OS on a different drive, I had just screwed myself over regarding that.
But, as the Trader says: “Over, under or around, there’s always a way.” And there was. With the aid of my trusty laptop, I downloaded a linux liveCD and copied it to a spare USB key I had lying around, and booted off of that (after my mortal kombat with my BIOS. NEVER buy a mobo with AwardBIOS 6.0, that thing will NOT boot from anything unless it is the absolute FIRST choice in boot order). Plugging in my OTHER USB key, I copied the Windows 7 iso from my downloads directory (cleverly placed NOT on my OS drive, let this be a lesson to you all!). Back to the laptop, I reformatted the linux USB key and copied the Windows 7 iso contents to it, and flagged it bootable again (different file system, don’tcha know). Then I booted from the USB key AGAIN, and installed Windows 7 from it. Success, I had a working system again.
So then I flashed my DVD drive’s firmware again and it worked perfectly (as expected). I spent the rest of the night installing applications and playing Killzone 2.
Lessons learned are left as an exercise to the reader, except for this one- DON’T PANIC. EVER. You can fix it.
…
…
…
…
Ok, sometimes you can’t.
