They say “An idle mind is a devil’s workshop“. I guess I became a devil on last thursday. Everything was fine till two weeks before. The Red Hat Linux and Windows 2000 existed co-cooperatively on a single hard disk! But then, some days before, I was unable to boot into Linux. The GRUB loader was not responsive to the keyboard commands. And that was it. I lost the patience. I installed Partition Magic 8, deleted the Linux partitions, one by one, and then re-formatted the whole unallocated space to FAT32. I was happy at my “kartoot” and kept on browsing. Shortly after power went off and I had to restart in the night, during my free time. There it was, the black screen with GRUB Hash command mode edition (or something similar), mocking at me, asking me, “don’t you dare play with me!” 😐
There was no floppy boot diskette. Even if it was there it was of no use, as the floppy disk was not working. I didn’t had a bootable installation cd of any Windows. Recently I had taken the essential software kind of DVD from home, which also contained Win XP SP2 installer image. But there was no CD/DVD writer in the pc. I had just a backup laptop for surfing the net. Now what to do? Continue reading →
