I just spent 30 hours, broken by 4 hours of sleep, rebuilding my desktop computer after my boot disk melted. And now I have to do it all over again. I am sooooo depressed. (I’m writing this from my laptop.)

I replaced the bad boot disk with a 180GB monster from Western Digital for $130 after rebate. Big mistake. It requires an ATA board because it’s too big for Windows. But I already had an ATA board in because I have 3 drives and 2 CDs. After the usual couple of hours of trial and error, I got the thing up and running, partitioned into two pieces, one of which (a mere 50GB ) I couldn’t format.

After loading all my software (well, not quite all), rebuilding all the pieces, restoring from my 3 daily backups (yes, I’m totally paranoid), I was in pretty good shape and even managed to work on my keynote at the Jupiter Business Blogging conference tomorrow.

In fact, I was feeling so confident that I ran Partition Magic 8 to see if I could get those 50 pesky GBs formatted. As PM started, it told me that some cluster count was being misreported and did I want to fix it. Sure, I said.

Kaboom. The 180MB drive is completely hosed. I can’t even figure out how to repartition it at this point. PM’s boot disk won’t fix it. It’s a boat anchor. I’m totally at a loss. It’s even too late to go out and get another frigging drive.

I’m depressed. I can’t face another 30 hours of installing and tweaking software. And don’t tell me that this wouldn’t happen with a Mac you bastards.

Categories: Uncategorized dw