The Lost Post

(This post was recovered from my Palm after the 'aftermath')

Right now, I surely hope that all successful people have to go through lots of silly mistakes and stupid decisons, coz boy oh boy, I've made one today.

Being a curious computer student, I'm interested in learning Linux. And the safest way to do that is to use LiveCDs, a miraculous technology that fits an entire Operating System onto a single CD. Basically, you can boot Linux from that CD and use it as if it was installed already. When you are bored you could just reboot and go back to the safety of Windows.

The basic premise of LiveCCDs is that it won't need a hard disk, so it is not supposed to modify it unless explicitly told to. I've tried a few LiveCDs, like Knoppix, Puppy Linux, and Ubuntu.

Then, last night I downloaded Linspire. It is a mistake I'll never forget. The details are hazy, but when I was booting it up the second time (first time was fine) the loading process hung. It is a normal thing to happen, and usually a restart is all that is needed. However, when I tried restarting to Win XP, it showed the dreaded message:

NTLDR is missing

Any good technician will tell you that those 3 words spell "fuck". I'll save you the gory details, but the bottomline is that all my files are gone, and GoBack could not help no matter how many times I restored to an earlier time.

So in the end I had to reinstall Windows, all my software, search back all the sources I found for my assignments, and redownload all those TV series (Smallville, Lost, QAF, L Word..). A very bleak evening indeed.

I of course threw the Linspire LiveCD away, but it still remains that it was one of the better Linux distros, and I won't mind installing it for good on my PC. But I just can't trust their LiveCD ever again.