Wednesday 26 March 2008

How Ubuntu Linux Saved My Work and Andrewk Saved Windows

There was this big tender that we almost completed and everyone was compiling the documents. Only my certificate was missing, so I rushed home to retrieve my softcopy to e-mail it back to my colleagues. When I reached home, my laptop would not boot into Windows XP (FYI, it shutdown properly only about 20 minutes before)!

PANIC! SHOCK! HORROR! But thankfully, I have Ubuntu Linux in my thumbdrive. Phew! So logged into Gmail and did the rest.

Meanwhile, I was surfing the net to try to find the solution to my Windows problem. When I tried to boot, all I got was a blank screen with the text "Missing ntldr. Press ctrl + alt + del to reboot." Gosh! I did that so many times. Why not at least tell me to use a recovery disk or something?

Initially I Googled the error but decided I should look for it in Microsoft's website. I was taken to the solution page... but my friend Andrewk who happened to just logged into MSN Messenger at that time pointed out that that solution was for Windows 2000... *shy* So added the word "XP" into the search string and came to the right knowledge database. From there, Andrewk provided me with the ntldr and ntdetect.com files and I can boot into Windows XP again.

However, I rebooted back into Ubuntu here to blog this story to show my support for this open source free operating system. WAY TO GO!