No Pity for the Masses

The dreaded GRUB error, dun dun dun.  GRUB is a bootloader program capable of supporting multiple operating systems.  In my case Ubuntu 9.10 and Windows XP.  If you’ve ever set up a dual boot system you’ll be familiar with GRUB.  If you’ve ever used a dual boot system for more than a month you’ll be familiar with GRUB’s error codes.  In my case it was Error 2: 2 : Bad file or directory type.

My setup:  I have 2 harddrives in my system.  A 75gb Western Digital Raptor and a 500gb Western Digital standard SATA drive.  The Raptor houses the Windows OS and it’s where I install any apps that normally take a long time to load.  The 500GB drive is for everything else, including a second partition containing my Ubuntu file system and the GRUB loader.

Recently my graphics card began to go all stupid on me resulting in hard Windows crashes, this in turn caused file errors in the NTFS partition of my 500GB harddrive.  And apparently glitches in the NTFS portion of your HDD can have an odd cascading effect that fucks up your GRUB loader, causing error 2.  Normally the solution would be as simple as running Windows chkdsk at load time but since GRUB doesn’t load I can’t boot Windows directly.  Additionally I didn’t have a Windows install disk handy to run a recovery console.

Just to be clear, the HDD isn’t failing.  I made sure of that using Western Digital’s hard drive integrity tool.  (Additionally you can try and let their tool repair the harddrive, it didn’t work for me.)

Enter Super Grub Disk. SGD is basically GRUB for idiots.  It holds your hand through the entire process and is pretty good at fixing or rebuilding the GRUB loader in a semi-automated fashion.  In my case I simply had it reset to the Windows boot loader.  After I was able to verify and clean my harddrive I reloaded GRUB and away I went.  Easy peasy.

Oh too funny, I was going back through my older posts for shits and giggles and came across the one about EBGames/Gamestop and how they basically signed me up without consent to Reservation Rewards. 9 months since that post I have obviously purchased more games and I’m sure you’ll be excited to know that I have NOT gone back to EBGames.

I thought it would be fun to list the games I’ve purchased since that day(not in order):

1. Saints Row 2
2. GTA IV
3. Beatles Rock Band (Full Box Set w/ Drums, Bass, and Mic.)
4. Fear 2
5. Dragon Age
6. Assassins Creed
7. Fable 2
8. Batman: Arkham Asylum
9. Dark Sector
10. Ghostbusters

And a few others.  Overall I’ve probably spent close to $600 bucks by now.  I don’t know whether to be joyous that I’m keeping to my convictions or saddened at how many games I buy.  Both.  Do I think it did anything?  Nope.  I’m not stupid, this small act of consumer rebellion is entirely symbolic.  Hell I’m sure no one but myself cares.

A friend of mine, who tragically passed away a few years back, used to say: “you vote with your money.”  Too true.  Sadly I think many folks forget that they wield power as a collective.  Oh sure, I’m a net cynic like all others and I don’t believe things will change.  If done gradually enough people may even feel grateful for what they have.  Viva la resistance.

Huh, seems I got a Google Wave invite as well. Isn’t that lovely. All these fun invites and not a soul to share them with. I’m pretty much old news at this point but I’ve been having fun with the Google Wave extensions. It’ll be exciting to try out the next time I have to get people to a centralized location for sexy time.