TVXB is a virus

There are days that my old friend Murphy pays me a visit. Yesterday was such a day : a collegue accidentally reinstalled a test server where I almost completed a rewrite of a complex configuration script. Three days of work down the drain. Yay.

That'll teach me of not taking backups of my work.

At home, I use a Home Theater PC (HTPC) to control my TV. At the time of installation, the choice of media center software forced me to use Windows as the underlying platform, of which I knew this would lead down the road to hate, suffering and self-abuse. Anyhow, the thing worked without many problems for a year, which is quite a success.

Uptill now.

I use a program to fetch the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) from the internet. EPG is a real treat when using a HTPC, or a TV altogether. Once you're used to it, you'll never want to go back. Some weeks ago, the program used to get the EPG from the internet, WebEPG, stopped working. Apparently, the website teveblad.be blocked all WebEPG user-agents, and as this is hardcoded into WebEPG, I had to look out for another solution. I thought to find this in TVXB, which I installed and configured, and ran without problems. For a few days. After that, it also stopped working. It seemed that there was a problem with write permissions (the thing wanted to write in "C:\Documents and Settings\Application Data\All Users"). So I decided to uninstall & reinstall as the program offered this location as a choice during installation. However, the reinstallation program started a repair session, which decided to remove some important Windows files. Like NTLDR and such, which I only discovered after a reboot, off course... Programs which exhibit such behaviour are called a virus.

That'll teach me of not taking OS backups of my only Windows PC.

So the difficult process of copying the missing files from another PC, and with the help of a slow-starting Ubuntu live CD, was running, up to the point where Windows could load its kernel again, and offered me to repair the Windows install using the Windows setup CD. Cool, I thought. So Windows rebooted from its hard disk, but when it presented me a 640x480 window with a setup program, I knew Windows had blown it, and I had to go through the process of reinstalling every program on it, just to let Windows register these programs.

Hate, suffering and self-abuse indeed.

Ghosty Mon, 12/08/2008 - 18:28

i recently read about clonezilla, tested it a bit and it's a VERY nice tool to have (i even run it from pxe boot, so backing up a pc is just a small time job!)