Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Monday, November 4, 2002
01:51 - Helpful Error Messages	(top)
A couple of days ago, my Windows 2000 machine ate itself-- or at least it did a darn good impression of eating itself. Upon boot, it presented me with the following clearly stated message: `NTLDR is missing Press any key to restart` Well, a couple of astute readers mailed me to point out that I should check the floppy drive. Because, see, that's the standard error message that the newer NT-based Windows variants emit when there's a non-bootable floppy in the drive, and when (as is typical) the BIOS is configured to boot from the floppy first and then the hard drive. (We'll leave aside for the moment the fact that a) Macs deal with non-bootable floppies by ejecting them before proceeding automatically to the next bootable device, and b) Macs haven't had to deal with floppy-boot-sequence issues for years anyway.) I was pretty sure that there wasn't a floppy in the drive, but it was at work and I wasn't, so I had to wait until today to check. So I did, and lo and behold-- there it was, a disk in the drive. I ejected it and pressed the "any" key, and the thing booted right up. Fancy that. Now, naturally this makes me feel pretty silly. But at the same time-- and it isn't only wounded pride talking, I'm pretty sure-- it occurs to me that they could possibly have made that error message (`NTLDR is missing`) just a little more informative... couldn't they? This, bear in mind, is Windows 2000-- the core of the new, enterprise-class Windows platform family, the rock-solid foundation upon which the Businesses of the Future� will be built. And yet somehow I recall that the old and primitive versions of Windows-- 98, 95, 3.1, and the MS-DOS that they ran on top of-- seemed to have had a much more useful error message when the machine encountered the stupefyingly uncommon boot-device configuration of a floppy in the drive. I believe it went a little something like: `Non-system DISK or DISK error` See, it had that ever-so-helpful word `DISK` in it. Twice, even. It led the user to conclude that maybe, just maybe, the reason the computer wasn't making with the taskbar and Bonzi Buddy was just perhaps something to do with the `DISK`. In other words, MS-DOS had a more informative error for one of the most common unrecoverable boot conditions than an OS written twenty years later does. Are they getting stupider up in Redmond as time goes on, or just more malicious? UPDATE: I believe I know what happened. The floppy in question had once been formatted as a WinNT/2000 boot disk. Since that time I had reformatted it for use as a conveyance for random data, and it was empty. However, the reformatting didn't clear the NT bootblock from the MBR, and upon boot the disk still thought it had a valid NT loader to invoke. I needed to have done a low-level format (or fdisk /MBR) to get rid of the bootblock. This doesn't much excuse the opacity of the procedure or the user feedback, or the stone-age retardedness of the PC BIOS architecture (can't they make it so that if one boot device fails, the BIOS skips to the next one?!). But at least I know what the machine was trying to say.