The Open Source Journal

Quite some time ago I installed Gentoo on my workstation for dual booting. As part of this process, I replaced the MBR installed by Windows Vista with GRUB. After getting another workstation for Gentoo, I decided to delete the dual-booting Linux partitions and recover the space for Vista to use. Sadly, I didn't stop to think before deleting my GRUB (/boot) partition and resizing my NTFS partition - rendering my system completely unbootable. I had to make the system bootable without rebooting, but how...?

I brought my Vista machine out of hibernation this morning to discover that the physical DVD-RW drive had disappeared from My Computer. In fact, the virtual CD-ROM drive provided by Daemon Tools had disappeared, too. After a typical round of troubleshooting (reboot, check bios, uninstall driver from Device Management and reboot, etc) followed by a brief googling I discovered the solution below.

Windows Vista has incorporated much finer grained control over Windows' power management features. Not only can you control when your monitor turns off or your hard disks spin down, new options let you choose when wireless devices go into power saving mode, USB devices suspend, and more.

Just in case anyone ever wants to find them (or when I need to find them again...) if you'd actually like to WATCH videos in MCE, you'll need the following *64-bit* codec pack installed:

64-bit FFDSHOW Codecs

In this post, I explain how I solved the mysterious "Cable is unplugged"-even-though-it's-not,-REALLY problem. The solution is simple and the problem is so very, very annoying. Read on to find out how I troubleshot and solved my nForce5 onboard Ethernet breakage (M2N-Sli Deluxe motherboard).