There are times when you just can’t do anything, I repeat, you just can’t do anything. In the evening I was working on my laptop and everything was fine. Next day in the morning when I got up, switched on the laptop and clicked on IE icon, it happily gave a beautiful error message “This application failed to start because msvcrl.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix the problem.” So it was the time for Googling about the error. Thank God I had Opera installed. After 2-3 hits I came to know that it was a trojan. Finally, there was one dll which needed to be deleted to get rid of this error message 🙂 But after that there was some problem with IE in opening some of the sites. One option was to upgrade to IE 7 but don’t know why, I havn’t started liking IE 7 yet. So no other option left than restoring windows (I have Windows XP Media Center Edition installed).

On all the laptops HP creates a partition where they store all the crap to restore windows back to original condition. They call it recovery partition (It eats upto 11-12 Gigs of space and recovers nothing really 🙁 In the recovery tool provided by HP, there are 2 options one is called normal recovery which will restore the OS and won’t touch your data (They say so but I read many posts where people talked about having lost everything to this so called normal recovery 🙁 another is called destructive recovery (I just love the name :-* ) which erases everything on the hard drive and restore back the system to factory shipped condition (Term courtesy HP). Obviously I didn’t want to lose any data. So I tried with normal recovery and it didn’t work actually. So I contacted HP for the same and asked about any other option. They said NO in a very stylish manner as technical people are taught to do.

Now the only option left was to go for destructive recovery. I got some blanks DVDs and burned the data so as to free my hard drive. Finally after a few hours of work my hard drive was ready to face destructive recovery. I ran the tool and it worked out something for around 40 mins showing me a progress bar for which I waited to complete as a lover would wait for his watch to strike the moment when his sweet heart has to come 🙂 Finally it was 100% complete and system rebooted. You know to find everything intact as if not even touched. So started looking for why the hell this 12 GB recovery partition if it has to do nothing ?

I also had Fedora Core installed so one thought struck that might be possible it is not able to do because of those Linux partitions, so deleted those partitions also and then tried but of no use. Finally only one thing was left that delete all the partitions and give the whole space to one partition and then try. Thank God it worked and my laptop was back with a fresh installation of windows. (Later on I came to know that existing of more than one partition was the reason why normal recovery also didn’t work and few more interesting things – in all the cases it didn’t give any error that was not able to restore or something and in case of normal recovery they delete all the softwares installed later but their shortcuts will still be there ? ridiclous, foolish, stupid ). I already had made my mind to make Norton Ghost image of the C drive to avoid this operation again in future. Before making the image, many things had to be done like configuring internet connection, updating windows, installation of some utilities & uninstalling Norton Internet Security that I got pre-installed along with the OS.

I use Sify broadband for internet. So installed the sify dialer and when I tried to connect it gave one strange bloody,out of hell message that “You don’t have any anti-virus installed, click here to download updated antivirus from Sify”. I just can’t understand why the hell Sify is worried about anti-virus on my system. As I said at sometimes you just can’t do anything, had to install Norton Internet Security again to be able to connect to internet. Later on I got another command based dialer Supersify for Sify from internet developed by an individual (Many thanks to him (using it I can connect to internet with AVG Free anti-virus installed which is not recognised by Sify’s dialer as a good anti-virus) & one of my friend Vaibhav who googled this thing for me and was with me on voice during whole of this story which lasted for a day, a good short story it could make on a TV channel broadcasting peoples’ frustrations with the technology) So after sweating out for one full day my laptop was back to normal 🙂

PS: If you just got a laptop and Windows is in fine condition, please make an image of your C drive using some tool. Other wise probably you also have to write a blog 😉

Sidhu