How I spent my weekend while MBI was in town.

[digitaldiscipline]

My workstation at the office is also the main print and file server. I took friday off because I had a guest in from out of town, and planned to go in for about an hour or so to take care of some little stuff. Ten minutes before I head out the door to come in, I get a frantic phone call from the boss.

"Your machine is broken. I can't get into windows, there's some kind of ddl error or something." Naturally, there's a deadline that afternoon.

I go in, and, sure enough, booting the system returns a "windows could not log you on to the network, msgina.dll could not be found, please contact your sysadmin." Um, yeah, that's me, thanks.

Let me just say that I am damn glad I put the data archives on a different physical disk than the OS - yanked the drive, put it in the boss' machine, and got the company limping forward that way. Let me further state that the "Repair current windows installation" option in win2k sucks my left nut. Worthless.

Of course, before getting to that point, I need to ascertain what happened. A convergence of a remote save command and the boss irrationally using my machine [an aging dual-processor 733 P3]rather than his much-nicer one [2.0GHz P4] to peruse cd archives, combined with the utter failure of IDE Channel 1 on the motherboard = teh fux0r.

Yesterday [yes, saturday, with company], five hours were devoted to a combination of determining that it was, in fact, the IDE header while simultaneously doing all the secretarial work for a pair of imminent-deadline reports.

Let's just say my boss doesn't handle stress well, and, as a retired engineer, is geeky enough to think he knows enough to question my decisions. It may come to pass that the 733 rig will be resigned to become a dedicated print server and backup file archive so it can live out its days in relative ease, and I'll get a much-needed "current" workstation of my own that -isn't- critical to daily operations [especially if I end up doing more real work and CAD drafting].

Beyond that, it was much, much, MUCH SW:G geeking with MBI whilst aishlynn beat Tetris Worlds for the Xbox 1.5 times when she wasn't utterly wiped out from an excessively-potent prescription from her Girl Doctor.

Comments

[ashengrace.livejournal.com]

damn, that was some pretty impressive troubleshooting :)

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Nahhhh. When the BIOS says "you can choose to boot from CD, floppy, or LAN, but not hard drive, sucka," that's a pretty strong shove in the direction that it's the drive, the cable, or the header.