Ugh. The day after I killed my laptop, the hard drive on my trusty ol’ desktop system died. Turns out, on the release version of Windows XP, the NTFS file table gets routinely hosed, and if your machine crashes during this sloppiness, the drive becomes unreadable.

NTFS capable boot disks can’t access the drive. Windows install can’t see it either, so no install over. I was left with the option to format the drive and see if it was still usable (I couldn’t even run a scan disk).

Now, you see, I hate losing data. I really hate losing data. I’ve got 10 year old data files (originally from Dad’s 286) that I’ve continually copied to new boxes. I’m an information pack-rat. For about a week I’ve had no computer at home, waiting for a miracle that might save my drive. I was working 12 hour shifts at the office, so this wasn’t so bad, but come the weekend something had to be done. The decision to reformat is one I’m loathed to make, like choosing a favorite backstreet boy.

Now, you might be wondering, “Mojo, if you’re such an obsessive data dork, why don’t you backup regularly for just such a crisis?” An excellent question, dear reader. A backup plan requires both effort and forethought. Unfortunately, I’m lazy, and often drunk, so, you see, such an approach is quite untenable from my point of view.

Fortunately, Google is once again a mighty oracle saving me many headaches. You see, as I learned from searche results leading to an obscure BBS post, there is a simple fix to this drive problem. Just boot your XP install disc, go to the rescue console, run CHKDSK, and your drive is all better. A simple solution that I should have figured out on my own. I suck.

On the laptop front, I’m considering buying one of them new fangled HP Pavillion ze5300s. About $1700 with a DVD burner and the works. I haven’t committed though, what with all the lovely choices out there. Damn this free will all to hell.