Rodfather Mobile

So I try to boot up my Fujitsu U810 last night and something horribly goes wrong. It wouldn’t boot. Right after the BIOS information shows up, I could hear a bad clicking sound from the harddrive and it would immediately shut down and go through an endless loop of restarting.

To say the least, I was bummed out. I initially thought my drive was gone. I’ve already dropped U810 about 3-4 times and it always came back like a champ. I didn’t remember dropping it this last time but I could have jarred it by not gently setting it down on the table. Thoughts of replacing it with a $500-600 32GB SSD drive crossed my mind so I can prevent things like this happening since I am always mobile with this device and could use the extra durability.

So I pull out my thumb drive which contains Bart PE which I installed a while back in case something like this happens to any of my computers. As long as you can boot from the USB port, you can run this slimmed down version of Windows for diagnostics, testing, and recovery purposes. I basically wanted to check if my C:\ drive was intact so I could go on to the next step. Bart PE is great in that you can also get a network connection and backup the contents of your drive if you computer doesn’t want to boot up.

It turns out my harddrive was fine. Within Bart PE, I could see the entire contents of my drive and ran chkdsk which showed everything looked ok.

Then I remember the last thing I did. I put the U810 into hibernate mode. Ok, this told me the master boot record (MBR) was screwed. I have a dual-boot set up of Windows XP and Ubuntu and have GRUB as the bootloader. So somehow hibernating screwed up the MBR and left me with an unbootable machine.

So I began searching around for a Windows XP install CD. I did not have one. The usual solution for fixing the MBR is running a boot disk or Windows XP install CD, going to the recovery console, and running  fixmbr in the command prompt.

I searched around and found that the Ultimate Boot CD contained some utilities to recover the MBR. I downloaded the ISO and burned a CD with the MacBook. After connecting an external CD drive to the U810, I booted the CD to see if I can fix this thing. To say the least, trying to find a utility that worked was frustrating. Some of the utilities ran a virtual machine and left you with a DOS prompt without telling you the name of the .exe file to run. I ran several boot managers from the CD and successfully booted into XP, but couldn’t figure out how to fix the MBR with the boot loaders. At least I could get XP going, but there’s no way I’m going to carry around an external drive just to get it to boot.

After about an hour, I found partition application that successfully restored the MBR and used the XP partition as the default boot partition.

The next thing I did was wipe out the Ubuntu partitions, install Partition Magic, and resize the XP partition to use the cleared up space. I didn’t use Ubuntu much anyway. If I ever need to screw around with distros, I’ll go back to using VMWare.

So… phew.. damn I’m glad I didn’t have to reinstall the OS or replace my drive. Bart PE and Ultimate Boot CD saved my ass and prevented me from considering trying out Vista again.