Skip to main content

Windoze! Never trust it...

This post is born out of frustration and panic and sheer anger at what happened to me last night. I decided to reformat my hard-disk because I had a lot of clutter on the drive and my computer was running slow. So, there was the issue of taking backups. This time, I decided to ditch the flash drive and take a backup on a DVD, so that there would be a permanent backup of my files. And because I was too lazy to download a proper DVD burning software, I used the Windows DVD writing software.

Well, so here goes. The files were written, and could be read on my desktop which runs Windows XP. Since the files were on DVD, I hardly bothered about multiple backups. Heck, you really cannot delete from a recordable DVD, can you?

And therein lay my fallacy. After having reformatted my hard-disk, I tried restoring from the DVD. I found that the DVD was extremely fragmented (yeah, you got that right, the DVD was fragmented), as a result of which my DVD drive went crazy trying to read the disk. I managed to restore around 1GB of data in an hour, then had to restart my computer to complete some updates that were going on in the background. On restart, I found that my DVD was blanked out. All my files lost!

What really happened is that Windows created a new session on the DVD, an empty session, when it copied my files. Then wrote the changes on the DVD. Then I tried all means to recover the lost session. I tried Cyberlink Power2Go, but this piece of c*** that comes with my computer is a useful software if you want to trash CDs. Then I tried CDBurnerXP. It did notice the sessions, but while importing the first session, it aborted with a UDF tag invalid message.

I suppose that there is no standard UDF format, and that is an issue with formatting a DVD with UDF.

The only software I found in 2 hours of searching that can recover my files is IsoBuster, and that costs $29.95. I am definitely not buying that, cause I don't have that kind of money.

Dear MS, please note that you are not Google. If Google tries to diversify, it is because it has capable programmers who can deliver. Not stupid programmers like yours who put in return 12; when they need to write a function to deliver text height. Thanks for messing my data and charging me for the same.

And MS may be the only company which advertises that its users are stupid to trust it. Heck, WIN7 is here, Vista was c***, you s*** if you use Vista.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

On Harry Potter and why I dislike the series

There could not be a better time for this post. There could not have been a worse time for this post. Now that the penultimate movie of the series is out, and my facebook wall filled with people who loved the movie. But this is something I really wanted to say, and I shall say it anyway. Harry Potter is pathetic literature. Now, you must be wondering why I say that. There are many reasons. Firstly, the storyline itself is flawed. When a writer sits down to write anything, he/she must set up some essential rules about what is happening. These rules must remain constant irrespective of how many times he/she changes his/her mind. This is so that the readers are allowed to have some sensibility in what they are reading. In the fourth book, Rowling goes ahead and kills Cedric. Then, at the end of the book, the horseless carriages are there again. Nothing special. We all knew that they are horseless. But then comes the fifth book, and BAM, the horses are actually winged beasts that only thos

On the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard

This is a post that I have been meaning to write from quite some time. Long hours spent typing code on my computer left my hands fatigued, and left me with a lot of pain in my wrists and fingers. That is when I decided to use the Dvorak. But I have got the same bad habit as Dr. Watson, to tell a story backwards. Of course, you must be wondering what the Dvorak is. The story of keyboards starts with the invention of the typewriter. Christopher Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter, tried with a two row piano style keyboard. But then, he got into many difficulties with the design. Then he finally settled for a four row design. This was similar to the QWERTY layout that most computers and typewriters today possess. The engineers at Remington, to whom Sholes had presented his design modified the layout a little further, and then the QWERTY was born. As typewriters became popular, people got used to the layout, and started practising touch typing, i.e. typing without looking at the keys

The paradox of government

I'm fascinated by the concept of government, and the paradoxes it presents. On one hand, governments grant us a certain set of rights or liberties. On the other hand, they work to strip us of the very liberties they promise. Now, I don't mean that all governments strip people of liberties, but there are liberal regimes, and there are sufficiently restrictive and dictatorial ones. Both models may have results to show, it does not mean that people in a restrictive regime are unhappy (refer to Dan Dennett's TED talk , where he states that ideas or memes can be dangerous when taken from one part of the world, where they are widespread, and, using the virus analogy, where people are immune to the memes; to a part of the world where they are foreign, where people may not be immune to the memes and where people may get infected). History has shown that people were sufficiently satisfied with autocratic governments with a benevolent dictator, and that people in other parts of the