use Perl

This has to be one of the most annoying windows files I have ever come across. Yesterday for the best part of 10 hours I had the painful task of finding out why my primary internet connection machine would only boot up in safe mode.

I had earlier set up my old works machine to run on my new LAN, via NetBUI, and had got it up and running in no time at all. Then I just needed to add the NetBUI protocol to my PIC machine, so it and the other machines could talk to each other. After rebooting it got halfway through windows initialisation and crashed, only to reboot in safe mode. After many, many attempts to remove settings, startup apps, and the network protocols, I was still getting nowhere. I phoned a friend (I would have asked the audience but had no email of internect activity) who gave me some pointers, but still nothing.

I have now discovered a little file, known as BOOTLOG.TXT, which logs all the activity when the machine is booting up. However, when it crashes and boots up in safe mode the BOOTLOG.TXT file is overwritten with the safe mode boot! After eventually realising I could drop straight to the command line and read the file (it was 9 hours later), I discover the offending file to be esdi_506.pdr. I changed it's name and rebooted .... wahey it worked!

So what is this file? Something to do with the network or windows settings? ... Nope, it's an optional Hard Disk control file. Funnily enough I've been having some painful times with the explorer locking up for several minutes when you click New Folder or try and rename a file or folder. It seems this file has been getting corrupted to the point it has now died. Thankfully I have now found an app SmartMon, that installs a valid version of esdi_506.pdr, so I'm now hoping that's going to fix it.

After nearly 10 hours of trying fix the wrong thing, I have learnt a valuable lesson. I should have installed Linux ;)