Zune, part two, day two

Tuesday, May 22, 2007 by Dave Winer.

I spent a few hours yesterday updating the XP laptop with the broken keyboard with four years of Windows updates. As it was rebooting for the last of six times a DOS screen flashes by too quickly to read saying something about a registry error, and when I try to boot using the last good configuration it fails, and loops, flashes the same message, and never boots. I pulled the power cord and let it do this overnight until the battery ran out, hoping that maybe a power recycle might cure the problem, but this seems desperate and very unlikely to work. 

So despite my best efforts and dozens of hours invested, I still haven't managed to get one song or podcast onto my Zune. In the meantime, of course the iPod is still serving my audio listening needs, with no extra effort. 

There's no hope of it working with the the other laptop, since it requires XP Service Pack 2, and it has Windows 2000 installed. I suppose I could buy a new copy of Windows XP for the laptop with the broken keyboard, but that seems ridiculous. I've paid for a copy of the OS for that machine, and I also have a working copy of XP running in Parallels on my Mac. And it would just be yet another experiment, because after all this michegas (including lugging a couple of heavy laptops through the NYC subway, JFK, SFO, and BART) there's no reason to suspect that more effort would result in success. 

Postscript 1: I took a movie of the machine rebooting, and froze playback on the error screen. It's hard to read, but maybe you've seen it before and have an idea how to fix it? 

Postscript 2: Jarod says Knoppix and a USB drive are a good way to get data off a dead PC.