Adventures in Computer Disasters

Yep. The PC is still giving me trouble. Won't boot. I can't even get it to a point where I can run Windows Recovery or even boot in safe mode. It sticks on WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\CLASSPNP.SYS.

A potential solution found online is to rename this file but I can't even get a command prompt going on the PC.

I should just wipe the goddamn thing and start over but there's a few files I want to try to recover and the damn Dell didn't come with installation disks anyway. It's got some separate partition that ought to allow a fresh reinstall but I can't get to the damn process to let me do the reinstall.

To say I'm irritated doesn't come close. So now I'm downloading an Ubuntu ISO and I'm going to load that on to a prepared flash drive. In theory, I can boot in Ubuntu from the flash drive and troll around the PC to see what I can do and what I can recover, if anything.

The important stuff is all backed-up, so there's that, but it would be nice to grab less-important stuff that didn't make the backups.

From there, I'm going to try to figure out how to fix the PC. If Ubuntu fires up, my first trip will be to address the CLASSPNP.SYS file, if I can manage that. If that fails... well, I'll have to track down my PC repair guy and see if he can squeeze in time to help me out. It's that or dust off, nuke the site from orbit, and buy a new goddamn PC.

I really don't want Windows 8. Sigh.