Sleepless in Seattle (Kazumi got sick)

Japanese OS

Like every other product in Japan, the default OS in Laptops and dekstops is also in Japanese. I tried to convert the language into English of existing system, but you need to have Vista Ultimate for this feature. My Laptop came with Vista Basic. So, there was no option for me to format the system and install the english OS. I had brought both Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista Ultimate from home… just incase I needed them. So, pretty confidently I tried to install Vista Ultimate over this version, but it failed without any clear error. I tried again and failed. So, then I just formatted this windows and started installation from Dos.. and it failed too, the installation would get stuck at last step of running windows for first time. My mind tensed up. I then tried to install Windows XP and it failed too.. with BSOD. Tried again and again for around 20 times.. switching many things.. recreating partitions, master boot record, bios settings, active partitions and what not. I was unable to sleep all night. I had Kazumi on chair beside my bed and I laid on bed… occasionally my eyes would close but then I woke up again and continue my tries.

Trying 64 bit OS instead of 32 bit OS

It was sehri time already.. I utilized this opportunity to goto Mr. Furqans room and borrow his Laptop. I connected it to internet and downloaded Win XP 64-bit version.. with net speed it took around 2 hours to get it. Tried to install that… and it gave an error that no hard-disk was found. So, another lead lost. I ran diagnostics of ram, harddisks and everything was fine. I was clueless and nearly in tears about what to do.

Linux to the rescue

Then I used his laptop again to download Ubuntu Linux. And that one ran like butter on the Laptop. I was both happy and pissed. Happy to see Kazumi running, and pissed cuz I could do nothing in linux except net browsing.. linux is worthless for my causes. I did manage to get in contact with my family properly for the first time using ubuntu though. And still kept on trying to install windows on other harddisk as multi-os setup.. It was sunday now And I spent the WHOLE DAY in bed… fighting the OS problem. Another Iftari went by.. More than 60 hours had passed in which I had taken a cumulative of 2 hours sleep max. I was unable to find anything useful on HP website or any other website for that matter regarding the problem. Except that a lot of people faced the exact same symptoms as me; On HP, IBM and Dell notebooks.

Climax

At around 10 PM I finally found a positive lead, maybe the harddisk was missing specific drivers. Since the new SATA drives come with drivers that are not by default supported in windows.. so that could be it. I downloaded the drivers from Intel site for my chipset, slip-streamed the drivers inside the windows xp 32-bit.. to make my own customized version of windows through nLite . And then started to install windows through it. I was asleep.. I had no power left in my body to see the results.. at EXACT 12:00 midnight.. my eyes opened again.. and running copy of windows ran before me. It was a miracle.. it worked.. my windows was working.. And as you can expect from excitement.. I was fully awake now. So, now all the crappy driver and software installation routine started. And I was done 1 hour before Sehri. So, now I put some torrents on download and went to sleep for 1 hour. That was the sweetest sleep I got in past 3 days.. I was no more "Sleepless in Seattle Yokohama ", I finally had proper working system and finally 24 hour INTERNET!!!!

From here on ahead, you all know the story… My blogging had resumed to frequent level.. and everything in life just seemed to work fine. Some classic movies don’t need a sequel. So the story of Kazumi and Karar needs to Sleepless in Seattle 2 also.

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