Arggh.
What can I say, my precious, my life, one of things that fills my world had let go of me, had betrayed me.
let me take you back to the beginning, not so long ago, yesterday I was sitting comfortably with my computer trying to get some work done, as an after thought I started to look into Ruby and IronRuby. It was sunny and the weather was nice, I listned how roads are being closed for Mr.Bush and was happy I postponed my consulting in Jerusalem for another day. it was really going to be a productive day.
All of the sudden my Vista freezes.
Nothing is responding, even the mouse got stuck. I've no choice but to hard shutdown my machine.
After that I was really surprised , astonished, I just couldn't believe it, my machine wouldn't boot.
A nasty blue screen was blocking all paths. Nothing worked : Safe mode, last configuration, nothing!
If you are interested on the grimy details it's excuse was registry corruption.
I pulled out all my tricks, nothing had persuaded it to work.
I read about Vista auto-fixing application, and for that I needed to boot from the original Vista disk, sounds promising right?
So if that wasn't enough my vista disk (legal don't you worrie about that) wouldn't boot, it just got me more crazy, I got to tell you my mood was foul.
I started downloading a fresh copy of vista DVD from MSDN and meanwhile tried to trick it into accepting my current disk.
Installed Nero on my laptop and tried to create a bootable disk from something.
I even got to DOS mode and tried to start my vista disk manually.
After a few hours of which I was upset on everyone, and I even forgot to eat! I got a working bootable dvd.
I don't know why I did had quite an high expectations about that auto-fix feature, Vista should be better than XP somewhere right? maybe it's right over here when you just need a rescue, vista will prevail! right? wrong.
Although it's nice and fancy it did nothing. it surrendered pretty quickly, it tried to rollback the registry issue, the log said it's ok at first, restart, blue screen, and now it was just enough smart to know it was failing and it did run out of ideas so you should sent the problem back to Microsoft. Great!
OK, last rescue, restore points.
I was perplexed to find out it didn't find any restore points to work with. How can it be? I was asking myself this all day. I'm sure I didn't turned off this feature and I'm sure I didn't erase them for some time now, and my system had been changed the other night for installing the new SP1 for office (it should have made a restore point right?).
So my anguish was great, I felt betrayed by whom I invested so much attention and care.
So I'm starting all over.
As a last note: check you registry for problems, apparently it's a known weakness of Vista, and check that your restore points are in place, you can never know, It was supposed to be a bright day.
Ariel