The Laying on of Hands

[mdlbear]

... so a couple of days ago the Wolfling comes to me in a mild panic saying her Window box won't boot after installing a game. It said something like "no OS found", which sounded a lot like a damaged MBR. Ugh.

After determining that she could get by without it for a while, I dropped the priority on the project and made sure I knew where my Ubuntu live CDs were.

This morning after breakfast I went upstairs, turned the machine on, popped the game disk out of the drive it had been left in, and replaced it with Hardy Heron. Booted perfectly, though there's clearly a fan noisily singing its swan song someplace in there.

Looked at the results of fdisk -l -- odd, the main drive seems to be intact. Mount it. Looks OK. There's also a random flash drive plugged in in back. Shut down (popping the CD in the process), pull the flash drive, reboot. No problems.

Best guess is that something on the game CD made the BIOS think it was bootable, but it wasn't.

I'm not a professional system administrator, but I play one at home.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

That or that flash drive tried to boot...

Booting Games

[idea-fairy.livejournal.com]

something on the game CD made the BIOS think it was bootable

That reminds me: Back in days of yore, didn't some games come on bootable floppies?

Re: Booting Games

[mdlbear]

Yup. Usually into a stripped-down version of DOS, so as to leave more RAM for the game itself.