Non Sequitur

I've been living with insomnia and the negative effects of sleep deprivation for some time now, and so it was that I awoke in a terrible funk just a few hours later. Unable to get email working in my secondary installation, I had to boot to the primary drive in order to receive my important communiques. On the way there, via the new C: > Chkdsk E: > C: alternate boot-path, CHKDSK locked up.


Obviously the situation was only getting worse on my primary drive. In my sleep-starved delirium, against all instinct and better judgement, I decided to let Windows repair itself using the installation CD. It would have been an easy thing to first finish offloading the remaining 20% of my data, but the recent success with Linux had left me feeling kind of invincible, and if this didn't work Windows could only hurt itself, right?

With the CD loaded I rebooted, selected the installation to repair, and pressed 'R'. Everything seemed to be going well enough, until the repair operation froze at 47%.


Rebooting, the Windows CD informed me that it had already failed to repair the installation and asked if I wanted to try again. Try. It had sounded a lot more confident before. But try it did and achieved exactly the same result: frozen at 47%.

My C: drive was thus rendered unbootable - no more email. And much to my chagrin, now the secondary drive wouldn't boot up - no more Internet either. But to top it off, even Linux wouldn't recognize my primary drive anymore - 20% of my precious data, gone.