HunterSteele
January 18th, 2013, 02:01 AM
My mom's been having trouble with her computer lately and she asked me to reinstall Windows. I agreed to do it since reinstalling Windows is easy enough, but with her the simplest routine things need to turn into complete disasters. It started while backing up her files. She asked me to remove Solitaire and Pinball since she doesn't play those. I told her that I would do it after the reinstall process when I was restoring her files. She insisted that I did it right now. I told her that since they were Windows components if I were to remove them before reinstalling they would simply come back in the fresh install. She then swore at me for never doing anything she told me to.
The reinstall process itself went fine. I put the disk in, rebooted, and let the installer do the work. After it was done and during the final reboot before the desktop appeared, I noticed a menu asking which operating system to start and both options were identical. It turned out the hard drive had two partitions-- one with Windows installed on it and containing all the files, and another blank one. I had installed Windows to the blank one instead of wiping the first one and reinstalling Windows there.
Not being able to find a way to just delete a partition, I decided to merge them, wipe the merged partition, and reinstall Windows again. Unfortunately the program I downloaded to merge them wouldn't merge the boot partition. No problem, I thought. I'll just make a bootable USB drive with Linux and a partition manager on it and it'll merge the partitions just fine.
Of course booting from a USB drive is a perfectly normal thing to do when working on a computer. But get this-- my mom's computer can't! It's too old to support USB booting. She got it from her relative about five years ago and it was already old then. I tried using a program to make my flash drive emulate a USB Zip or floppy drive (which her computer can boot from) but that didn't work either. I told her that at this point it may be best to buy a new computer. Instead of just doing that like a reasonable person, she uses her sarcasm and fucking mind games which she loves so much. She told me that I could just leave it-- she didn't really need a computer at all and that I didn't need to finish the process. I offered to buy her a new computer and she said if I did she's throw it in the garbage. You'd think she was just saying that because she was frustrated, but no. She has on at least one previous occasion thrown out something I bought for her on mother's day purely on principle.
I'd just forget about the whole thing, but she still keeps bothering me about her computer. The only think I can think of next is to burn a CD that lets you boot from a USB device, but if nothing else works, why would this? On top of it all, I spend most of my time at my dad's house and my mom's computer is at her house. I can't stand to spend any time at her house with her because she's always getting mad over nothing and calling me names. I could also remove the drive and put it in another computer to merge the partitions, but to put it simply I just don't want to. She treats me too much like shit for me to bother doing that.
Does anyone have any ideas, technical or otherwise, for how to fix this mess?
The reinstall process itself went fine. I put the disk in, rebooted, and let the installer do the work. After it was done and during the final reboot before the desktop appeared, I noticed a menu asking which operating system to start and both options were identical. It turned out the hard drive had two partitions-- one with Windows installed on it and containing all the files, and another blank one. I had installed Windows to the blank one instead of wiping the first one and reinstalling Windows there.
Not being able to find a way to just delete a partition, I decided to merge them, wipe the merged partition, and reinstall Windows again. Unfortunately the program I downloaded to merge them wouldn't merge the boot partition. No problem, I thought. I'll just make a bootable USB drive with Linux and a partition manager on it and it'll merge the partitions just fine.
Of course booting from a USB drive is a perfectly normal thing to do when working on a computer. But get this-- my mom's computer can't! It's too old to support USB booting. She got it from her relative about five years ago and it was already old then. I tried using a program to make my flash drive emulate a USB Zip or floppy drive (which her computer can boot from) but that didn't work either. I told her that at this point it may be best to buy a new computer. Instead of just doing that like a reasonable person, she uses her sarcasm and fucking mind games which she loves so much. She told me that I could just leave it-- she didn't really need a computer at all and that I didn't need to finish the process. I offered to buy her a new computer and she said if I did she's throw it in the garbage. You'd think she was just saying that because she was frustrated, but no. She has on at least one previous occasion thrown out something I bought for her on mother's day purely on principle.
I'd just forget about the whole thing, but she still keeps bothering me about her computer. The only think I can think of next is to burn a CD that lets you boot from a USB device, but if nothing else works, why would this? On top of it all, I spend most of my time at my dad's house and my mom's computer is at her house. I can't stand to spend any time at her house with her because she's always getting mad over nothing and calling me names. I could also remove the drive and put it in another computer to merge the partitions, but to put it simply I just don't want to. She treats me too much like shit for me to bother doing that.
Does anyone have any ideas, technical or otherwise, for how to fix this mess?