No, not at work, but at home. “Hectic?”, you ask? What could be so hectic about a weekend? Let me take you back in time - 48 hours.
Saturday morning: I have an old computer which we bought for somebody else. This computer had an ultralong password, which we couldn’t even fathom out. Choices: Format the hard disk & reinstall everything, or remove the password somehow. Obviously, I chose plan B. The question was, how? Pretty simple if you have physical access to the machine. Windows stores usernames and passwords in an encrypted form in a file called SAM somewhere in the WINDOWS folder (system32\config to be exact). I hooked up the hard disk as a slave device and deleted the SAM file. Voila, instant password deletion.
Saturday afternoon: My dad & I had a lot of plans to sort out our confused computer network and cabling. We have an old Pentium II which we plan to convert into a router. I also have a second 20 GB hard disk (Seagate) with nearly 15 GB of MP3z, all neatly ordered, labelled, grouped and renamed. Unfortunately, my computer doesn’t recognize this hard disk if I try to club it with my primary 80 GB Samsung hard disk.
Enter Ritchie Street. Head towards Supreme Computers. Purchase one mobile HDD enclosure, one keyboard, one modem, one adaptor cable. Not to mention one big 1 KVA UPS for the home. Total burn in pocket - Rs. 7300/-, inclusive of all taxes, coolie charges, parking charges, etc., etc., etc.
Saturday evening: Hook up the 20 GB into the hard disk enclosure and plug it into the USB port. Error: This device cannot start. Hmmm, what could be the problem here? OK, take the 5 GB from the old comp (the one I removed the password from) and plug it in. Working… all files detected. OK, try the 20 GB again? Same issue. OK, put in the jumper to make it a master. Working! Note to self: Always plug in the jumper to make it a master device before placing it into the enclosure.
Now, it’s already pretty late and so we couldn’t set up the network fully. Warning to my sister: Computer will not be available from 8.00 AM to 8.00 PM on Sunday, 7th August 2005, due to maintenance.
Sunday morning: My sister complains that she has some important work to complete. OK, we say, but you have only 1/2 an hour. She’s up and away. Half an hour later, we’re burning a few CDs containing microdistributions of Linux, specially optimized for routing and firewall purposes (namely IPCop, SmoothWall and Live CD Router).
After shutting down everything, we disconnect all the cables and start cleaning the place first. A few months of neglect is enough to assure a layer of dust at least half an inch thick. Vacuum everything, from the floor to the keyboard. Blow out the dust collected over 4 years inside the SMPS. In short, a complete revamp.
We finally connect one PC together and plan the layout for the router. The router software is yet to be installed. Connect the system and insert the IPCop CD. Boot from CD and see a warning “All data on your hard disk will be deleted”. Yeah yeah, I know this. Confirm by pressing Enter. The boot process starts up, only to end with this message “Kernel panic: Aiee, attempting to kill init!”.
???
Retry with Live CD Router and SmoothWall. Same problem. Attempt to reload RedHat Linux 9 which was already there on the hard disk. Same problem. Try to format and install Windows 98. System stops responding. Try Win 2000. STOP error. I was practically ready to throw the system out the window.
Last option. Plug in the hard disk into the enclosure and format it from within Windows XP. Reconnect it and try IPCop again. Installation successful!!! “Yes! I am invincible!!!”. Reboot. “Kernel panic: Aiee, attempting to kill init!”. AAARRRGGGHHH!!!