What a horrid last few days. Around lunch yesterday I restarted my Windows box at work, and I was greeted with unpleasantness. At the login screen, I got an error informing me that some instruction in memory has performed an illegal operation. After clicking on that, I got the infamous “NT Authority” says you have 60 more seconds with Windows error.
On rebooting the machine, I was notified that “C:WindowsSystem32hal.dll” is missing. I called shins, but sure enough, my entire Windows directory appeared to be empty. On closer inspection, Ubuntu informed me that it wasn’t empty, but instead, it was receiving an Input/Output error when trying to “ls” the contents. I ran a “chkdsk /r” wholly expecting that NTFS has fucked it all up again, and I seem to have been correct – at least in part.
After the chkdsk, I advanced two seconds further than my last attempt to boot Windows, only to be greeted with some cryptic error informing me that my registry looks about like that train over there. Repairing was not an option, so after much fingernail biting, and a few choice words, I decided that my only remaining option was a reinstallation.
Let me take a moment here to talk about the Windows reload process. My problem isn’t that I think its crappy and that I think someone should do something about it. I actually know that its crappy compared to any other Operating System’s standards. I can’t tell you how many damn “Next” buttons I had to click. And then how many preferences I had to change. This would have been much easier if I could have used something like Synaptic to check all the programs I wanted to install in one swoop. Additionally, on a *NIX platform, all of my application preferences would have been saved under my home folder. Windows is a tard in that department so it took me about five hours to get it back to usable.
After that got resolved I fired up my Virtual Machine containing my webserver (cheap hosting solution I know) and found that the MySQL database wouldn’t start. It ended up that the filesystem on my Linux box was corrupted as well. I ran “fsck” and fixed a dozen or so errors, rebooted, and realized that one of the files that was corrupted happened to be the MySQL user’s table. Long story short, I learned alot about troubleshooting MySQL, and got everything restored without losing any data.
Now I am finding other files all over the place that are 0 bytes in size. I have backups, but since the original file still exists when the backup is made, the backup is successfully overwritten with the new (0 kb) file.
John (and I partly) suspect VMWare may be the culprit. This is an incomplete theory however, and the entire process has left me visibly shaken. We run financial systems on these things. We run nuclear power plants with these things. My net worth is just a number sitting on some hard drive in a basement Wachovia owns somewhere. What happens when that dissappears?
Zone of Mr. Frosti 
I have been thankful to not have gone through that process in quite some time. On a better point I never setup my windows boxes the same. Which really annoys the hell out of me, but keeps me from conforming to one standard so if shit does hit the fan I usually come out all right. I pretty much never fuck with default settings which can slow me down a lot, but in this scenario a reinstall isn’t a big deal. The data loss however is a huge deal. I find that I don’t save a lot, at least anything that is worth saving or can’t be replaced easily. Maybe pictures are about it, but I’ve got them in a fuck ton of places so really, who cares.
On that long and windy note I know you use a lot of tools, customize the shit out of apps and have a crap ton of development services and utilities running, so I feel for you.
best of luck in returning everything to it’s normal state.
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