Warning: This blog is not for the feeble or weak of heart!
A couple of days ago, (feels like weeks!) my harddrive seemed slow and my machine seemed to be dragging. What is the first thing you do? Defragment it, of course. So I just Defrag-ed my harddrive but the thing still took forever to run my most frequently used programs which have already been moved to the QuickLaunch. Hmmm...What if I partitioned the harddrive? And make lots of FOLDER heirarchies in an attempt to organize my work? Cool idea, lets do it. But how?....Aha! Partition Magic 7.0!!!! Ok so let's break my 80GB HD into smaller 20GB chunks. One for the OS...one for the installations so I don't have to look for them everytime....One for the Software that I install after much deliberation...10 GB for the documents/pdfs/emails I will eventually accumulate over the years...8 GB for misc stuff(read installed games/game patches and trial games)..and 2 GB for the Virtual memory - just to speed things up. After making many diagrams on paper and redesigning the partitions numerous times, I go with the initial idea of 20GB partitions. PM 7.0 is installed and I configured my partitions. Lets reboot and let PM do it's magic!...Hmmm...it says 24 Operations left and Operation No.1 is going to take about 2 hrs....No prob. It' time for me to go home anyway. When I come in the morning, I'll have a 206 Mustang in place of this 1970's VW...Or so I thought!!!
The next day.....
Arrived at work a little late coz my Mustang was going to be meaner and faster and I (thought I) could accomplish a day's work in half a day! Smugly, I moved the mouse to "wake-up" the machine. The orange light on the monitor turned to a healthy green...PM 7.0 was asking the user (that I persumed to be me, coz no one else was around!) to "Hit any key to reboot"...Just minutes from experiencing my 24 Valve V8 Thundering engine...The machine is rebooting...Shows the Windows XP loading screen with the animated blue bar at the bottom...Oh Joy! A little skipping dance is in order....In mid-dance, the screen goes blank and the machine is rebooting again...Hmmm...No matter. Let her reboot again. I continued dansing. The machine showed Windows XP Loading Screen and rebitted gaian...uh huh! Did I take a backup of my data before attempting to rearrange my data? Er...no...and why not? Coz it never did this on all my previous successful partitionings. And I call that a valid reason?...Ok, it's rebooted five times already...clearly something is wrong? How about reinstalling windows....That will save the data...right? Hah! No such luck. The only way out is to format the HD and reinstall Windows.....NOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo.........
So, my avid reader, the next time you think you know what you are doing ask yourself to backup or shutup!
