XP Heart attack

Well, today I almost had a mini-heart attack during the process of upgrading to XP SP1. Well, more to the point, SP1 installed, and then the system didn't come back up. My fault entirely... not Microsofts.

Seems it doesn't LIKE you to use a hacked kernel. You shouldn't muck around with it... its a bad thing. Of course.. you know me, if I am not tweaking and playing with the OS.. what good is it. Well anyways, the hacked NT kernel refused to boot. It was the ONLY entry in my boot.ini, so there was NO way to recover. Or so I thought.

Ends up, on the XP CD is an option called "Recovery". With it, it lets you "log" onto the NTFS partion and run some special commands. One being BOOTCFG. Note that for the future my friends. You ever nuke something.. this is yer friend. After some trial and error, I was able to basically create a new entry for the core kernel and redirect it away from my hacked one. Then it booted up fine. Fixed the issue with my hacked kernel... and everything is running tickety-boo.

I found an interesting "feature" in the MS debugger. You have always been able to do an asm{ int 3; } to fire a breakpoint interrupt which typically can then be caught in your debugger. VERY useful trick when you need to do some REAL low level break point catching in a "production application" (reminds me of the story about the Russian Nuclear Defense system response code that someone accidently left in there and was only found AFTER the cold war basically ended) But don't do that in a device driver or any dll MS might load. Ok? Please don't. Nothing like watching Developer Studio TRY to load XP into the debugger. I had over 512 megs of ram FULL before I finally was able to terminate it. *shutter*

I am wanting to get back into Squash again. If anyone is interested, I am shooting to play atleast two times a week now. So if you are willing to play in Chilliwack, drop me a line and we can set something up. No earlybirds please.