"Murphy's Law Strikes Again!"

For the last few weeks at work, I've noticed a hard disk drive error when I boot up my PC. (I typically do this on Monday mornings as I shut down my machine every weekend to save power.) I usually manage to find my way around it. Today, after lunch, I couldn't unlock my computer. It wouldn't even reboot in safe mode. So I pulled out the installation CD and booted from that. I ran a chkdsk /r to repair bad sectors. I was able to get the system to boot and was able to back up my files to another system, after removing some corrupted files.

The in-house tech has advised me to reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything. He also gave me another machine to use from here on out.

One hard drive failure can ruin your whole day. And possibly the next day as well. Thankfully it's a slow week.

And my dislike for Maxtor hard drives has deepened. (Although we don't have Maxtor to kick around; they were recently acquired by Seagate.)

Installs, installs.....

Yesterday, I received a replacement machine to replace my ailing desktop. This "new" machine, which I've named "Cutter", is a Dell Dimension 8200, with a Pentium 4 2 GHz CPU, a 40 Gb hard drive (haven't checked if it's Maxtor or not), and 256 Mb of memory.

Today's been spent reformatting the hard drive in the old system (which was called "Skywise"), reinstalling Windows on it in case it's used again soon, installing Windows on cutter, retoring the saved files I had backed up yesterday (which was mostly successful), and reinstalling the apps I need. Whew.

[Updated 17:25] Now that my email access has been set up again, I get to go through the rigamarole of trying to recover my email from the past year. Because it's gone. And I don't believe it was ever downloaded to my old machine. As far as I know, it's still on the server. Dude, where's my email?