Ok, so I must be masochistic. I came into a old laptop that was being disposed and I thought I’d try to install Windows 8.1 on it. Guess what? It worked! However, just the OS itself pushed the hardware to the point where the CPU fan was running non-stop. So I gave up on that idea.
Then, buoyed by success, I went to the other extreme. I brought out the big bag of idiocy that is Linux. I’ve tried Mint before and I liked it. So I burned a disc of the latest Mint. The laptop froze during boot. Hmm. I do believe I’ve seen that before… So I burned a disc of an older Mint. Laptop boots, finds sound and network, we’re good to go.
I do the installation, and in the process, I wipe out all disk partitions and start from scratch. Install proceeds well and I reboot. As soon as I hit the button to restart, I started mocking the system, saying “Now we’re going to go to a black text screen that spews out a bunch of statuses. See, this is why normal people don’t use Linux. No one wants to see that shit.”
Well, I must have offended it, because on bootup, I get a black screen that says:
GRUB loading.
Welcome to GRUB!
error: out of disk.
Entering rescue mode…
grub rescue>
Seriously, what the fuck? I’m approaching this install as if I can give this laptop away as a basic Internet device. GRUB? “out of disk”? What the fuck does that mean? I then had the following conversation with GRUB:
grub rescue> help
Unknown command ‘help’
grub rescue> ?
Unknown command ‘?’
grub rescue> mount
Unknown command ‘mount’
grub rescue> diag
Unknown command ‘diag’
grub rescue> go
Unknown command ‘go’
grub rescue> exit
Unknown command ‘exit’
grub rescue> quit
Unknown command ‘quit’
You know what? I fucking HATE Linux. I did some searches on that error and I read all kinds of crap. But mostly, no one knew how to fix it. Someone made a wild suggestion that not only might the hard drive be bad, but the motherboard may be as well. That’s insane.
But you know what else? I’m going to keep fighting this issue for probably the rest of the day. And if I succeed, all it will do is tell me what level you have to be at to make the supposed best OS in the world “just work”.
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