Raspberry PI frustrations and Why Windows 8, Why?

Spoiler alert. This post has absolutely nothing to do with Linux and is simply a way for me to vent my weekend frustrations.

I had planned this week to review a distribution and write an article about Debian.

On Friday morning I set up my Raspberry PI to download the necessary files whilst I went to work. I have mentioned before that I live in the Scottish wilderness and therefore my internet connection is based on a couple of tin cans attached to a piece of string.

The Raspberry PI is perfect for this sort of thing. I don't have a desktop computer and therefore to download files whilst away from the house used to require using a laptop and leaving it on all day. Now I just queue up the files and let the Raspberry PI do its thing.

I tend not to do much on a Friday night and so it was Saturday before I needed to use one of the files.

Unfortunately something catastrophic happened to the Raspberry PI and not only did it not have the files I needed it had also corrupted the operating system.

Luckily I back up the Raspberry PI quite often so all I needed to do was take out the SD card and put the backed up image onto it.

Unfortunately the last time I had backed up the Raspberry PI it was to my Windows 8 machine and I hadn't had time to copy it over to my backup drives. No worries though because the Windows 8 machine was working ok or so I thought.

Whilst booting up a message appeared stating that something had gone wrong and that the computer needed to restart. The restart took me to a blue screen where it said something along the lines of reconfiguring settings.

The reconfiguring settings took 3.5 hours.

Installing most versions of Linux takes up to 15 minutes. Installing Windows takes up to 30 minutes. What on earth was Windows doing for 3.5 hours. It wasn't connected to the internet so it wasn't downloading anything.

One final reboot and the computer restarted and I was able to use Windows again and there were no apparent changes whatsoever.

I ended up spending a little bit of time on Sunday reinstalling the image on the Raspberry PI and downloading the files required for the next distribution review.

In the mean time I have just released an article showing how to convert from WAV to MP3 and MP3 to WAV using Linux Mint.