慘
慘 – Can3 – Tragic, Disastrous, Brutal, Merciless
慘敗 – Can3 Bai4 – Tragic Defeat — Fiasco
Today, for fun, I tried to install Linux on my old computer. A fiasco ensued! The first thing I tried was to download and burn a CD of Knoppix, just because I’ve heard so much about it on Slashdot. Using BitTorrent I was able to download it at superluminal speeds, and burning it was no problem. I hauled the old computer out of the closet, made some space for it, got it networked up, and tried to boot from the CD. Instead of a nice CD reading noise, the computer made some painful squeaking sounds, and then just booted into Windows. Did I screw up and somehow create a non-bootable CD? After a few tries, and trying to read some other CDs I figured out that the CD drive is completely broken! It can’t even play audio CDs anymore.
But that didn’t stop me. Another version of Linux, Debian, allows a network installation starting from just two floppy disks. I downloaded the required disk images, and tried to create bootable disks on my newer computer. I had a box of ~10 year old disks lying around, so I used those. First disk… “error writing sector”. Well, these disks are old. Second disk… “seek error”. That’s funny… third disk… fourth disk… fifth disk… all giving errors? Did I spill Coke all over these disks too or something? Finally, one of them got all the way through. I tried to boot the old computer with it… and it didn’t work! I tried with several more disks, even tried booting into DOS to see if that would work better, but they all failed. This disk drive couldn’t be… also broken? I used the network to copy one of the disk images to the older computer, and used Windows to write it to one of the disks that was failing. It worked the first time! And it booted up into the Debian installer! Amazing! A broken CD drive on one computer, and broken disk drive on the other! Anyway, now I had a way to proceed. I used the older computer to write disk two, and booted into the installer.
After booting with disk one, it asked me to insert disk two. First step, configure keyboard. Fine. Second step, repartition drive. Let’s delete the old partitions, create a swap disk, and allocate the rest to Linux. Warning, warning, warning! This will delete all your data, are you reallly reallly really sure! Yes yes yes, I’ve backed it up, I’m sure. Deleting… writing… checking… partition complete! Next step, install drivers. Insert disk three. Wait… what? Disk three? I THOUGHT I ONLY NEEDED TWO DISKS!??! Well, it turns out I chose the “wrong” versions of disks one and two to create, and to get my network card running, I needed some drivers from another disk. Oh well, I’ll just download the required disk and… wait… I can’t write it with the new computer, because the disk drive doesn’t work, and I can’t write it with the old computer, because by reformatting the hard drive I have turned it into a cinder block!
At this point I went out to the living room to tell Jenny what a fiasco this has become, and how the hardware is actually coordinating its efforts to thwart me. She said “wow, so is there anything you can do?” I told her not to worry, all I have to do is reinstall Windows on the old computer, and then I can use that to write disk three. I went back in to do exactly that, rummaged through a bunch of old junk to find the original copy of Windows, put the CD in the drive, and rebooted. The computer started up, tried to read the CD and instead made painful squeaking sounds… OH THAT’S RIGHT, THE CD DRIVE DOESN’T WORK!
My mind raced, and I quickly considered the more radical options: various schemes of transplanting drives from one computer to the other, or maybe I can get the source code to one of those disk image writing utilities and modify it so that it writes each disk block over and over and over until it comes out right… Luckily Jenny was calling me from the other room to come play with her, so I did the smart thing and gave up. Tomorrow I’ll use my work computer to write the disk images and then nothing more can go wrong.
Right?