Sometimes life imitates art in a way that is truly scary. You know that moment in the horror film where the music changes and the camera angle tells you that something nasty is coming from behind, and you maybe shout at the screen “For God’s sake, don’t go out there!! Look behind you!!” So last night, having taken another, clean back-up of my operating system and programmes configured just the way I like it, I thought “Why don’t I have another go at creating that partition…” I even shelled out for the latest version of the partitioning software. Should have been a doddle; and even if it wasn’t, I could now recover in an hour or so…. [cue the spooky music ….]
This was around 7 pm, about an hour later I knew it wasn’t working. I had clicked something that that was interfering with my MBR file (this is like the front door lock for your computer, and without it you don’t get in.)

The next hour or so was spent restoring my MBR. I managed this okay. But like in the horror movie, each step towards apparent safety lures you deeper and deeper in to the swamp. So my horror story took me via somehow changing the drive letters so that the C drive was now the restore partition and the operating system sat on D. I could handle that …. NO I couldn’t! This meant that my backup software couldn’t now see my drives properly so I couldn’t restore to my safe copy. Around 2 am I decided that I was going to have to restore the machine to delivery condition in order to allow me get a clean disk to restore to. By 4am I knew that the restore partition was corrupted… I went to bed.

Never mind I have a 3 year warranty with those nice Dell people, they will help with the restore then I’ll be fine. So this morning I have spoken to 4 very friendly, very polite Orientals who were very helpful. They explained that due to some dispute about licensing with Microsoft et al that I was not able to get another copy of the delivery image. This is a little like losing you car handbook and Ford telling you that they won’t give you another one. So here I sit 3 hours later, I think I have restored my operating system, but my backup software (which worked perfectly 2 days ago) seems to be taking forever to offer me the chance to restore to my clean system image. [I think that music might be playing in the background round about now…]

I’ll let you know how this gothic tale ends up but the crazy thing is, even if I succeed in being back to where I need to be I still won’t have the partition that I want. Do I try a third time or should I leave well alone. As you settle down with your coke and popcorn, I’m thinking that you must be wondering how dumb one person can be…

PS>> The restore software is now telling me that in only 9 hours I’ll know if I get killed off or am the blood-soaked survivor