Rogue

This Saturday morning just gone, I awoke from a heavy session of BF2 the night before - meaning my eyes felt like someone elses, my trigger finger ached, dehydrated from the alcohol, and I was tired as a mofo - and had a bit of what at the time seemed to be a bright idea.

Follow up:

Since my PC just will not fit in my LAN case correctly since I got my new parts (the HDDs and optical drives have been sitting in the bottom of the case) I thought it was high time I went about transferring it all into the ol' black full tower case (Atlas) that my parents brought across a couple of weeks ago when they visited. I love the Atlas case because it has oodles of room and is dead easy to work in, plenty of smooth surfaces and components that click off and slide out. Rather groovy.

So I powered down and moved everything into the kitchen which is big an open and doesnt have carpet so is about as safe a PC work area as any. I immediatly began to re-appreciate quality case manufacturing; The LAN case has these rivet ends around where you screw in the PCI cards which make it bloody hard to get standard case screws in, let alone my sexy black thumbscrews. The Atlas on the other hand is as smooth as a freshly shaven... smooth thing. So it makes putting expansion cards in and out a breeze. Likewise with the HDD chassis, the LAN case has a 'U' shaped chassis which kind of flaps around a bit when not bolted in whereas the Atlas has an '0' shaped chassis which is thoroughly secure. And security is something you should really care about when it's going to be holding your HDDs. I also got reaquinted with slideout motherboard mountings, freakin hurrah!

But then about half way through I took a step to the right and got a wet foot. "That's a bit strange" i thought "i didnt mop this morning." upon further examination I can see a large splash pattern in a thin film of water. Looking up I see what looks to my eyes like water damage on my ceiling. It had been raining for the past 24hrs, and we get acid rain here. Oh goody. So I make a mental note to call my real estate people and give them the good news, then move everything away from the damp and finish the surgery. Luckily it wasn't still dripping and all the PC parts stayed in the cases.

So I boot her up and lo and behold it doesn't. I get some obscure Windows cock-up that i really didn't have the patience to deal with. "Fuck it." I say to myself via inner monologue "I'll fix my partitions and OS." Because since I recently did a reinstall of XP on a partition not tagged as C:, while there were still residual OS files on C: it continues to search for all things Windows XP like on C Even though its not there. And don't say "Just do this in windows recovery console" or whatever, no I tried it and NO it didn't work. You are wrong.

So I blow away all three partitions on the 80gb OS/scratch drive, format a 10Gb OS paprtition and the rest for scratch, queue up the XP Pro install then walk away.

Half an hour later I had a freshly installed OS on the correct partition. I pop on all the drivers and service packs I could ever need. Reboot. And hey presto! It still won't boot without a bootable medium in there. Oh well.

One day I'll get my thumb drive to have the bootable files on it and use it like a security measure. Pop out the thumb drive and suddenly my PC won't boot unless you know the trick. Kind cool, in a really annoying way.