I didn’t manage to write as much as I had intended yesterday. I took time off to go see Avatar. Wow! What a visual experience. We watched it in 3D and the whole thing was incredibly rich and beautiful, especially the Pandora world and its people. The story was a typical hollywood story, “not very complex” was my partner’s observation. Still, it was a pleasure to watch.

I did revise one more scene after we got home, and then had the hair-brain idea to boot into windows and remove some of the pre-installed crap that laptop vendor had installed. That went well. No problems. When I sent Windows a restart signal, it told me that it was installing two updates and not to power-off until it was done. Two updates! How long could that take? (I forgot that almost everything takes a long time with Windows). I walked away and some time later—perhaps 5-8 minutes—I came back to see a black screen. I hit the ON button—and probably shutdown the computer during it’s update.

When I rebooted I got “Grub” in the top left corner and an immediate reboot. And another. And another. Yikes!

I should have known that it was a grub problem right off the bat but I got more than a little flustered—panicked might be a better word. I worried a horrible hardware problem had occurred and that Gateway wouldn’t honour the warranty because I changed the partition tables. So the first thing I did was put in the Ubuntu disk and boot into Linux. Then, I couldn’t figure out what to do from there so I put in the Windows Restore disks and restored the Windows system which took f o r e v e r.

When the computer rebooted—nothing. It no longer did a rapid reboot, but it didn’t give me grub, Linux or Windows.

At this point I did not have much data on the hard drive. Just two days worth of revising the Dragon. Fortunately I could boot Ubuntu from a cdrom, go to hard drive and save my revisions on a portable drive. That done I reinstalled Ubuntu.

Whoo hoo! Grub was back. So I booted into Windows only to find that setup wasn’t done. When it was—you guessed it—no grub. I grabbed all the patience I could muster and installed Unbuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) once again. Thank goodness a Linux install takes only about a half hour or so, maybe less. Now I’m afraid to boot into Windows. The problem may have been my trigger finger on the ON button, but it may also have been that the update over-wrote the boot loader. So until I find out a faster, better way to repair grub I am not visiting Windows.

I’m glad that I didn’t lose any of yesterday’s work though, and hey, Happy New Year everyone!