No big deal

So. I haven't written for a while. Partly because I'm on chillaxing at home and basking in profound depths of unproductivity an partly because my computer had some issues. Or, rather, I gave it some issues.

I was running some neat software I'd found that did diagnostics on all sorts of things and for part of it I needed to go into safe mode. No big deal. There's two main (read: safe) ways to get into safe mode. One is to hit F8 during the boot sequence. But, at the time, I couldn't remember which function key I had to hit. So I used the other method. Go to run and type in msconfig. Then check the /SAFEBOOT option in the boot.ini tab. No big deal.

I'll not that when I did this a warning came up that told me I didn't have priveleges to do that change. But then it let me do it anyways. This should've made me stop and think, but hey...

So I reboot and... realize that safe mode can't use my network log-in. Damn. No big deal. I'd just reboot and hit F8 (I looked it up) and select normal boot. Oh yeah. The boot.ini file defines what a normal boot is and I'd set that to be safe mode. Damn. Oh well. No big deal. I figure I can just log in locally and change it back and I'll be good to go. Well I couldn't figure out how to log into my local machine. Eventually I called IT and it was easy enough - I just had to use that password that they'd given us during orientation... yeah... OK. Now that I had that I just had to change it back and that'd be that. No big deal.

Sadly, I didn't have the privileges to use msconfig. No big deal, I could go and do it by hand (I just had to edit a text file). But I didn't have the privileges to edit that file. No big deal. I'd just change the permissions. Except I didn't have the privileges to do that either. Big deal. Well this sucks.

Then I came up with a solution. I could just use my linux partition to get at the text file and fix it. No big deal. Except that Fedora core 4 can't mount ntfs. No big deal - I could get the right package with yum. Except that I couldn't access yum off-campus w/o an ssh account. No big deal - I just sent an e-mail to helpdesk... and found out that Olin didn't have a yum repository for fc4 anyymore. No big deal - I could just change which repos were enabled and used the fedora-extras one to get me some ntfs support. Except they didn't have 3g-ntfs for fc4. Sad. Thankfully, a kind soul at IT suggested a Knoppix LiveCD with built-in ntfs support. Now it was definitely no big deal. Right? I mounted my windows partition. I found the text file. I opened it up. I changed the offending portion. And I found out that Knoppix only has read support for ntfs. Damn.

Then I found Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK). This aptly-named Linux distro booted from a LiveCD with built-in ntfs read and write support. Hooray!!

Now, Lappy feels much better and I'm back online and fully functional. And I even found a hot new program to blabber on about. You'll get that shortly I'm sure. ;-)