"What a difference a day makes, 24 little hours..." so sayeth the song.

I guess that's the premise for the very popular TV show "24" staring the no longer very hunky Keifer Sutherland. It's certainly ruled today in this house. This time last night, I had switched my computer off for the night knowing we would be seeing each other in the morning.

I didn't realise how much we would be seeing each other in the morning.

The new clunk-wheeze-freeze-reboot that I had just met a short time before shutting down the night before, in the morning became a black screen of misery, loudly proclaiming "missing or corrupt C:\windows\system32\config\system".

Or something like that.

And it wouldn't let me repair it, which is probably just as well because it was the hard drive that was stuffed. Well, some of it.

So I did what I always do. OK, so I didn't really cos I didn't bother with crying or screaming or throwing something. Instead, I called Murray. He didn't answer. But he called me back. Ha, you thought I was gonna say something else, didn't you. The call went something like this;

Me: I'm on the scrounge.
Muzz: What do you need?
Me: Have you got a 40Gig plus hard drive lying around unemployed and needing work?
Muzz: I'm not sure, I'll have a look and ring you back in a minute.

I rang him back 10 minutes later...

Me: Yo, it's me
Muzz: HI, yes I have an 80Gig Western Digital I haven't used in a while, you can have that.
Me: They have 160Gig Western Digitals at Tricky Dicky Smith for $108. But 80gig sounds nice.
Muzz: Come and get it.
Me: I will, thanks. You know, if you keep this up, I'll start liking you.
Muzz: [laugh] of course.

Bored yet? Well I'm boring me because it's 3 in the morning and I am nearly ready to sleep.

Anyway, it took all afternoon to get it running (while 80Gig was formatting, Reg and I went out and bought him a new car - it passed the time) and I have just finished moving almost 40 gig of data onto other drives and run a diagnostic over the offending hardware. It found unspecified "errors" on the disk and on repairing them, completely removed 2 of the 3 partitions on the drive.

I think that once it's fdisked and formatted, I will slave it onto the kids machine and Heather can store all her music on it. Or maybe not, I don't think I could stand the tantrum if it crashed again and lost all her stuff.

Bugger.

There are some days when I don't like computers very much. The other side of that is that this has been a good learning curve, and what I learned today was good value, not only that my rescue disks and stuff are no damn good until I burn them onto a cd, but that my backup procedures are more or less working as well as they can on a machine with 240Gig of hard space and only 10Gig free across all drives and partitions. And besides, if I wait a bit, I can get a MUCH bigger hard drive and everyone knows size matters.

I think I might drag the big server case out of the cupboard and start planning a new computer, from the ground up. But first I need to paint the case a funky colour. Murray already painted the other server case that I gave him black, and I was thinking along the lines of midnite blue fine flake metallic with about 5 coats of lacquer, ice blue neons and gold highlights.

Whaddya think, too conservative?