Hardware support

A while back, my brother's computer had issues. It would dump core of random programs, and would produce a BSOD under Windows at random times, too. Running memtest86 showed that something was wrong with the memory, so we replaced it. Unfortunately, that didn't help; so the conclusion I made was that there was something wrong with something between the processor and the RAM—the cache (L1 or L2), some data or address line degrading, or perhaps even the memory controller. In any way, that didn't matter; what mattered is fixing the issue.

So we replaced the mainboard and the processor with something newer. He's now got a pretty modern mainboard, with all the interesting bits and pieces found in such a thing, and a Dual Core Pentium4 at 3.4Ghz. Occasionally, I must say that the socket 775 is pretty... weird. But I digress.

Upon installing everything, I found that trying to run the system with broken memory had managed to corrupt whatever was on the hard disk; his ReiserFS superblock thought the filesystem was some incredible amount larger than it really was, and Windows would turn up a BSOD before even booting. The first was pretty easy to fix; I hit 'e' in the grub menu, added init=/bin/bash to the end of the kernel command line, and instructed some tool from the reiserfs toolkit to fix the filesystem. After that finished, and after a subsequent exec /sbin/init finished, Debian was up and running again. That took all of a few minutes. Having booted it, I proceeded to install the security updates that had accumulated for Sarge since the time his system had started to break down (which is a few months). Then I realized that I had to reconfigure the system to understand the new mainboard.

Only that had already happened. Hotplug, discover, and perhaps some friends, had all done their work and there was nothing to be done anymore. Isn't that nice.

The same couldn't be said for Windows. Booting from the install medium and choosing "recovery" in the install menu didn't fix things. Even reinstalling the system without formatting the hard drive didn't get us any further. The only thing we could do was to wipe the drive clean and reinstall.

Windows better hardware support? My ass.