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aruanAt approximately 9:43 this morning, the good Dell tech supporter proclaimed any piece of data on my hard drive as good as gone. Gone!
I'm sure emotion will set in about this as soon as the shock wears off.
Long story short, ran XP installation which completed then crashed in the finalization phase due to a "fatal error" (and doesn't that alone frighten the bejeezus out of everyone else, too?) and will not be coerced to finish the process no matter how I cajole it, yet the only thing it can be compelled to do upon startup is begin again. No desktop, no way to quit the program, nothing.
My computer has been reduced to a three-thousand-dollar broken record.
The only reason why I haven't spiraled into deep depression at the bottom of a bottle of amber liquid is that I backed up almost everything on the external drive before running the upgrade. So far as I can catalogue, the only things lost are my *NSYNC fic folder, which sucks a lot as I've spent the past two years building and categorizing it and quite a bit of it is stuff that's not on the Web anymore, and my internet bookmarks, which, while also spectacularly sucktastic, aren't wholly irreplacable either. My 80 gigs of media, 15 gigs of pictures, and 18 gigs of music are all snug as a bug, and how happy am I that I took the time, however frustratingly long, to make that transfer? Because there's no telling what state I'd be in right now otherwise, but it sure wouldn't have been one conducive to the Ethics test I just took.
So, yes. At least that. *sigh* And of course, what they tell me I need is another XP installation disk (as the recovery disk for my old OS is no good because XP wiped it completely during installation) that could somehow be magically made to hocus-pocus XP into repairing and booting.
And I'll tell myself that's all that needs to happen, because the mere thought of the alternative really will drive me to drink.
I'm sure emotion will set in about this as soon as the shock wears off.
Long story short, ran XP installation which completed then crashed in the finalization phase due to a "fatal error" (and doesn't that alone frighten the bejeezus out of everyone else, too?) and will not be coerced to finish the process no matter how I cajole it, yet the only thing it can be compelled to do upon startup is begin again. No desktop, no way to quit the program, nothing.
My computer has been reduced to a three-thousand-dollar broken record.
The only reason why I haven't spiraled into deep depression at the bottom of a bottle of amber liquid is that I backed up almost everything on the external drive before running the upgrade. So far as I can catalogue, the only things lost are my *NSYNC fic folder, which sucks a lot as I've spent the past two years building and categorizing it and quite a bit of it is stuff that's not on the Web anymore, and my internet bookmarks, which, while also spectacularly sucktastic, aren't wholly irreplacable either. My 80 gigs of media, 15 gigs of pictures, and 18 gigs of music are all snug as a bug, and how happy am I that I took the time, however frustratingly long, to make that transfer? Because there's no telling what state I'd be in right now otherwise, but it sure wouldn't have been one conducive to the Ethics test I just took.
So, yes. At least that. *sigh* And of course, what they tell me I need is another XP installation disk (as the recovery disk for my old OS is no good because XP wiped it completely during installation) that could somehow be magically made to hocus-pocus XP into repairing and booting.
And I'll tell myself that's all that needs to happen, because the mere thought of the alternative really will drive me to drink.
