Truth, Computing and Fail

The last 4-5 days have been quite hard for me. The hard disk got a sudden shock and this lead to some bad sectors on a partition and Windows as dumb as it is, compounded the woes. It was simply unable to start and for some reasons unknown the HDD kept on operating at peak capacity without further progress. I tried running chkdsk in safe mode and according to it, the errors were fixed which was in now way even close to the reality.

Now a format seemed inevitable and I tried to copy all the movies and songs from it. Windows sucked once again and wasn’t able to copy even one file all the time showing cyclic redundancy errors. Edgy was able to copy 3 of the movies, that was all the capacity left in the linux partition. I wish I had set aside some more space for edgy.

Coming to the formatting part, Windows failed in this aspect too. The formatting was stuck at 8% for what it seemed an eternity. On the other hand, formatting the partition and changing the filesystem took some 5 mins using gparted on Ubuntu.

In the meanwhile switching over to Ubuntu meant that I had to find some packages to have the same functionalities as I had on Windows. First on the list was an IDE for C++. Though some suggested emacs, I finally opted for Anjuta. Install it using the usual apt-get install routine. Now to make it work you need some more packages: autoconf, automake and glib. While the first two were available from the universal repos, a apt-cache search on glib returned a lot of results with the closest being:

libglib1.2-dev - Development files for GLib library

The reason for choosing the dev package being this one.
Anyways, installing this didn’t help and I had to download glib from here.

Came across a nice tutorial on restoring grub when it was screwed due to the change in order of partitions.