Reinstalling Windows and Space Shuttle Explosion

It's 9:51AM. I'm about to fdisk my
laptop's hard drive and reinstall Windows.
Fun. I'm at the scary moment where I've
backed up everything and have to take the
big plunge where I delete everything and
hope that I have the right drivers,
software and patches to make it work
again. I'll chronicle the painful affair
throughout the day.

10:05AM - Forgot to flash the motherboard's
BIOS before starting. Doing that now.

10:12AM - BIOS Successfully flashed. Since
I had the mother board replaced it's been
reporting as a Latitude on startup... it's
an Inspiron. No, I'm not just geeking
out. I thought they might have put the
wrong board in there. Now it reports
Inspiron. That's nice.

10:19AM - Downloading boot images with
fdisk. The one I had isn't working today.

10:29AM - I am now past the point of no
return. The hard disk has been fdisked. I
repeat, the hard drive has been fdisked.

10:34AM - There it is... right on schedule
immediately past the point of no return.
Trouble. The WinXp boot disks I have
aren't working. Disk I/O error. Now I get
to find some new boot disks. Still
optimistic.

10:56AM - Got the boot disks working. Now
a new problem. When they get to the end of
their work they claim that there's no cd-
rom. Which is correct... I have a notebook
and have to swap the cd-rom with the floppy
drive. But windows immediately goes
into "can't continue" mode and only allows
me to exit setup. Hmmmm.

11:12AM - Dammit. Can't build directly to
XP Pro because the CD won't boot and the
boot disks don't work in tandem with the
swappable cd. So I have a copy of XP Home
which I'll install and then I'll upgrade to
XP Pro. I don't like this solution and
while XP Home is installing I'm going to
see if there's a workaround to the
swappable disk thing. Argh. Losing my
optimism.

11:29AM - Just heard that the space shuttle
blew up on re-entry. Horrible news.
Horrible news. I remember when the first
shuttle blew up. I was living at West
Point, NY and was standing outside waiting
for the bus on a cold day. All of a sudden
I heard my mom yell from across the cul-de-
sac for me. I headed back into the house
and we watched the news reports. Heather
came in today and said "Did you hear about
the space shuttle? It blew up." Then I
checked cnn.com. My heart goes out to the
families of the lost crew. There will be a
lot of discussion in the next few days
about the impact on the space program.
It's the impact on the crew's families that
matters.

11:35AM - Giving up on the windows install
for a while. Not
feeling good right now.

12:08PM - Spent some time watching the news
but decided to turn it off and just think.
Called my mother.

12:28PM - XP Home is now installed. Can
connect to internet. Immediately I'm going
to install XP Pro, hopefully reformatting
the HD.

12:58PM - Setup started but then choked
while reading the XP Pro cd. It may be
corrupt. Great.

1:47PM - Watched Shawn O'Keefe's press
conference. Thought some more. I've
always identified with the space program.
I always wanted to be an astronaut. It ws
an astronomy book given to me at age four
in Italy that interested me in space, which
interested me in science and eventually
computers. Astronomy and space have always
been hugely important to me. I was
thinking that if I had chosen to persue
space more I could have found myself at
NASA. I wouldn't be on the shuttle, given
my age, but I would be somehow involved.

1:49PM - The install is back to square 1.
After the XP Home install and subsequent XP
Pro fail I found another XP Pro cd and
found that it boots properly. So now I'm
going to fdisk again and start all over.
Ugh.

2:13PM - 52% complete with the initial hard
drive format. All seems to be working.

2:34PM - Format done. Actual install
happening now. Technical briefing by NASA
at 3:00PM today. It's a very unrealistic
expectation that we have for NASA to give
us any sort of answer. What happened,
happened. Their primary two operational
goals are 1) preserving data so that they
can do a full investigation later and 2)
recovering the bodies of the crew. Press
conferences deal with their politial and
social goals which are not necessarily in
line with their operational ones. This
will likely take years to understand.

2:57PM - Success. Windows XP Pro just
booted.

3:20PM - Windows locks up. Nice. This was
one of the problems I was hoping to get rid
of. I have three computers running XP and
this is the only one that does this. Must
be something hardware-based. But they just
replaced the motherboard. Maybe they
didn't replace the memory. The good news
is that now windows is booting in about a
minute instead of the seven minutes it was
taking before.

3:23PM - Another lockup. Error points to
Nvidia display driver problem. Great.

3:43PM - Reinstalled graphics drivers.
Working for last five minutes.

6:45PM - About 13 apps installed. Outlook
starts in 3 seconds instead of 25 seconds.
Nice.

10:04PM - 23 apps installed including the
big ones like SQL Server and .NET. Data
restored from backup. It's been a long
day. They're saying that the
instrumentation aboard the shuttle showed
that there was trouble in the left wing.
Possibly the result of a mishap on launch.
What was interesting to watch is the way
that technology played a role in the news
coverage. Personal video was captured and
on-air in less than an hour. Digital
photos of debris were emailed and on-air in
a few hours. Amazing.

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