Complete migration to Linux ... well almost :P

Few months back my primary OS windows 7 crashed on me due to a major power surge. The file system was so badly thrashed that a huge amount of data was held ransomed and could not be accessed. Now I do know my way around windows very well and have used and installed windows since windows 3.1 and Win95. So with the years of experience the gut feeling was to go on with standard recovery methods...

So the first thing I tried was to try an boot the OS normally ... that did not work ... so next I tried to boot into safe mode.. that also did not work ... one more reboot and tried the last know configuration (/aside this option has saved me a number of times in the past, esp playing around with registry tweaks and beta drivers and other usually dangerous stuff like attempting to use manually patched files or dll's /aside).

After some disk crunching and agonizing moments with promises to return to the green pastures of Aero enabled Glassy magic... I restarted the OS in normal mode and zap ... there I was staring at it my second BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) in win7 ... now I had been using using win7 since RC1 and have been pretty happy with the 'stability' no pun intended. The screen stared at me at VGA resolution on a full HD enabled TFT :| This was getting a bit irritating ... I quickly pulled out my Dell lappy and did a MSDN search for the STOP error. The correct term to a diagnostic check by the windows kernel, this is some what equal to a kernel panic in Linux and a console message.

Now most windows users are use to a quick reboot if they encounter a STOP error... but I knew better from my years of MSDN reading and DSN (Dell Solution Network) that something was up.. (/aside yes I have been a Dell tech at one stage /aside). It pointed to a file system error, yes due to a major power surge... solution run a disk check... well as the OS was not booting.. time for rescue mode to kick in.... Booted with the win7 dvd and performed a chkdsk /f on C: D: E: .......... this took several hours.. :(  This is a 1 TB HDD and has a lot of data on it......