I am in awe. NTFS has its head stuck so far up its own ass that it’s breathing colon fumes. Actually, I misrepresent NTFS, because I’m actually pitting it for not being flexible enough. You think Bob Dole comes off as stiff? Insert Viagra joke here? Compared to NTFS, Bob Dole looks like Dave Letterman with twenty-inch wang (now that’s charisma!). You see, NTFS has a “feature” that I found about as charming as a hornet-and-crushed-glass enema. It’s not something people ordinarily worry about, and it’s not the sort of thing that comes up all that often, but here it is:
If you write “too many” files to the C:\ directory of your WinXP machine when the hard drive is nearly full, the Master File Table can become fragmented and eventually corrupted, preventing your machine from booting.
Happily, your machine will continue to run just fine for as long as you leave it running after this error. The next time you reboot your machine, however, prepare to find a steaming slurry of goat diarrhea in your burrito. Surprise! A few critical files are totally hosed!
NTLDR is missing
press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart
Every article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base recommends a complex process involving the ritual sacrifice of one’s firstborn, the cursed WinXP Install CD, a herd of Gadarene swine, a qualified exorcist, and the Recovery Console. After following a Minoan labyrinth of hyperlinks from article to article, I began to experience deja vu. It seems that no matter how deeply you dig into the pile of shit, each of these articles advises the same three processes:
- replacement or repair of NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM
- FDISK /MBR
- a complete repair install of WinXP
These all make perfect sense! And yet, having gone through these processes, I was still taunted with the infernal black screen with pale gray text:
NTLDR is missing
press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart
I sat through a Web Chat with {John_D} from Microsoft, who very patiently walked me through the exact same sequence of infuriating and painful steps, each one exacerbated by the MSIE-only chat interface that was only marginally less painful than being gnawed to death by toothless alligators with halitosis. At least they didn’t charge me $35.00 for the privilege of watching them flail about like a quadruple amputee trying to waterski.
I have been subjected to a month of government-sponsored “training” at the height of summer in San Antonio Texas, and yet I began to recall with fond smiles picking red ants out of my socks and swatting at black flies with radar cross sections larger than my own, when I tried to figure out what was wrong.
In desperation, I tried CHKDSK. Trusty old CHKDSK, that never actually fixes anything, or bitches at you, or screws up your startup process. I tried it. On my next boot, I was able to access the BOOT.INI menu! Woohoo! Jubilation!
And now I discover that all of the “helpful” procedures I had run (you know, the perfectly reasonable ones?) had made life very ugly for me: Windows thought I had done a brand-new install! I managed to force WinXP to use a known-good restore point – a procedure which required burning five tallow candles made from the fat of quintuplets, arranged in a pentagram, while I chanted Redmond’s ZIP Code (98052, if you were wondering) backwards and swung a censer of burning RAID driver floppies – but I digress. I also had to do another complete repair install, and “activate” my copy of WinXP by telephone, which required barking numbers into a phone while a creepy AI somewhere outside Seattle, reminiscent of HAL or possibly Mother, burbled them back to me with all the cheery pep of an audible self-destruct timer. Trying to artificially inseminate an angry orca would be more enjoyable, and wouldn’t take half as long.
You can exhale here – this is the part where I get really wound up.
So I went to go look for what I could do to prevent my MFT from getting fragmented in the future, and it turns out that Microsoft’s built-in defragmenter DEFRAG is better suited to shaving leprous chihuahuas than actually defragging your hard drive under NTFS. According to the MS Knowledge Base, “you cannot defragment the MFT once it becomes fragmented using the Disk Defragmenter.” There is, however a setting you can change in WinXP that makes your MFT much less likely to spew bits all over your hard drive like tubgirl after a large bowl of chili, but it would be too fucking simple for MS to set that option to the safest setting when you install their badger-felching piece of detritus. I’m considering sending the author of DEFRAG an industrial pallet of Kleenex-brand personal tissue, so he can wipe the ropes of thick green pus out from between the lines of brain-damaged code. I hope he mistakes it for a delicacy and suffers a horribly embarrassing personal biological misfunction! Come on, you dung-witted excuse for a coder: DEFRAG doesn’t defrag all of the files that can become fragmented? What will I discover next: AUTOEXEC doesn’t automatically execute?
Resolved: NTFS is only slightly more flexible than the reproductive organs of a bonobo doped up on the LD-50 of Cialis and turned loose at Hugh Hefner’s mansion.
Resolved: The Microsoft Knowledge Base is about as useful as a Tengwar-to-Klingon dictionary or a 259-step elevator emergency procedure checklist that suggests “try to exit elevator through the main door” as step seven.
Resolved: The coder who quit early the day he was supposed to be writing DEFRAG deserves a job in first-level phone tech support for Furbies, Aibos, and other animatronic pets, where he will spend all day deciphering grandmotherly baby-talk and the confused wailing of angry and perplexed customers stymied by poor coding. He also deserves to be raped by the aforementioned bonobo and dropped down the aforementioned elevator shaft.
Aside in praise of Diskeeper: Diskeeper is a fifty-dollar utility that will do all of the things Microsoft’s DEFRAG should have done in the first place. It will defrag your MFT, it will run at boot time with CHKDSK, and it will detect actual fragmented files, moving them around until they’re all contiguous. If Bill Gates would just buy them out and include their utility with Windows, this entire fiasco wouldn’t ever have to happen. I purchased Diskeeper and am much happier.
Resolved: Bill Gates is a rich asshat who grew up scrawny, and is blissfully ignorant of the momentum a dinosaur gains when it moves in the wrong direction. He deserves to be tea-bagged by the first male brontosaurus that Science manages to clone from amber-trapped DNA, and tossed down the aforementioned elevator shaft with the bonobo, the dictionary, the coder, &c.
fin
