It never fails. As I type, Windows 2000 is reinstalling on my gaming system. Why, may you ask, would I do such a thing? Were it a GNU/Linux system, such an act would be preposterous! The simple, sad truth of the matter is, I thought I would spent a few moments to reinstall Windows over and existing install, maintaining my settings, so APCI would work properly again. For some time now, for no obvious reason, my Windows 2000 install simply fails to poweroff when I shut it down or even reboot without manual intervention. Why? Who knows. That’s how Windows issues go.

My first mistake was to try resolving the situation at all. Instead, I should’ve tossed up my hands, exclaimed “Windows sucks hard”, and moved on with my life, as I have for the past six months this issue has presented itself. Apparently, today I just wanted to waste some time. Lots of it. Thus, I proceeded to perform the seemingly simple reinstall action.

However, reinstalling wasn’t possible without first removing Daemon Tools 4. Having done that and reinstalled, I’m greeted with a nice error from a pathetic driver Daemon Tools uses, SPTD. The error, in broken English, simply reads “failed to opn config key”. After much research I discover that the key in question has been written to the Windows registry with no permissions allowed of any kind. It was not possible to recovery permissions via any method I could determine. The key was simply orphaned, but undeleteable. I came across one commercial application that may have been able to resolve the problem, but the trial version refused access to the option.

Left without Daemon Tools, I thought I’d at least play some Battlefield 2. Or so I thought. Reinstall Windows 2000 seemed to void my installation of Direct X 9c. There is no possible way of removing and reinstalling Direct X. Simply reinstalling yielded no results. dxdiag reported failures when attempting to test Direct X 8 and 9 functionality. Not surprisingly, reinstalling my NVidia drivers after a complete uninstall had no effect.

So, a fresh reinstall begins, from scratch. Silly of me for creating a NTFS partition from a Knoppix CD, as that doesn’t work at all for a Windows 2000 boot partition. It seemed to believe the bootloader was therefore already installed, so Windows refused to boot. Instead, I’m waiting for the hour long process of running a block check on a modern, 80GB ATA disk, to complete. It boggles my mind why any modern filesystem needs a completely badblocks check, but Microsoft thought it was a good idea to do one anyway!

In another thirty minutes, that should complete and another thirty or forty minutes later, Windows 2000 should be reinstalled. At such a time, I’ll need to then reinstall my graphics driver, sleep through the Battlefield 2 reinstall, rebuild my keybindings, reinstall utility software, the list is endless…

I really despise Microsoft Windows.

While the third party application SPTD is surely at fault for creating a broken registry key, there’s little reason for Windows to randomly stop shutting down the hardware when it used to function fine, or failing to allow any method of recovering a completely orphaned registry key, or breaking so horribly in general so as to require a complete reinstall.

At this point, I’m just going to dd the whole thing to another system. I’d rather wait for a single dd run to complete across the network of the disk, gzip‘d of course, than go through the heavily interactive process of reinstalling everything. It’s bound to be faster to write a whole 80GB image back to disk and certainly less aggravating.

It’s worthwhile to note that the practice, by many recent Windows games, of installing user settings and save games into My Documents, which I initially disliked, is quite brilliant. I didn’t have to mess with any of my Battlefield 2 settings. It simply just worked after I reinstalled. I didn’t need to reconfigure anything and nothing was missing.