Sigh, by some strange coincidence, my ram, hard drive, and my subwoofer conked out in the same evening.
I noticed my computer wasn’t working fine because of a lot of BSODs and computer freezes and errors, and I guessed it was the RAM. Today it breathed it’s last, and died on me in the middle of reading a very funny story. The computer refused to boot up and made beeping sounds. I removed one stick of 512 MB RAM(266MHz DDR), and the beeping continued. I removed the other stick and put the first one back in and the computer came back to life.
having 512 MB ram sucks 
. Afterward,I talked to a friend who is a hardware expert, and he told me he was surprised that the cheaper, over-the-counter RAM lasted as long as two and a half years.
The very same day, something went wrong with windows. I decided to give linux one more fair trial. I decided to stick to that until I got more RAM in December, and popped the debian autoinstall CD in. I let it start and go get some coffee, and when I’m back, I find that it’s stuck inbetween. After a reboot, even the windows bootloader doesn’t work fine. Turns out my partition table is ruined. My OSes were on a 40gb hard drive that was 4 years old (that’s around 30 in hard drive years, but that’s pretty okay), I have to send it back to the manufacturer to get it repaired, as it’s hopefully still under warranty.
Then I decided that I’m not gonna spend today trying to fix a broken computer. I just turned it off went outside and watched four kittens try to catch bugs in the lawn nearby.
Best decision I’ve ever made.
If anybody knows how to repair a broken partition table without having to cold format the drive, do let me know.
You need to do a ‘fixmbr’ in the recovery console(kinda like DOS prompt). You can use the existing bootable XP installation CD to boot in to recovery console.
@saurabh, The problem is that the software doesen’t recognize the partitions, so I had to use a diagnostic CD to try repairing the table. I’m gonna take my drive to someone else’s computer and repair it from their OS.
so fixing mbr or installing grub, etc won’t work. Thanks for the suggestion anyways.
Ok
wew men. i cant give any suggestions. but the fact that you found a better way to enter yourself in times of distress is commendable.]
when i have broken computer i walk to and fro like pendalum, i cant site, cant think straight, am a wreck. cant think about anything but fixing the damn thing. you do know how’ve stayed up all nite during that ubuntu incident.
somehow. you are better.