Muddyfunkster: A Word to the Unwise

As you can imagine, as a day off Monday was a bit of a write off – I wasn’t in much of a state to do anything, so we went shopping with the mnusic vouchers attained through the birthday! HMV on Prince’s Street was a candy jar, but since I didn’t have any vouchers of my own I restricted my self to one CD – well, a double CD. Turned out Wet Wet Wet were doing a gig in the basement to celebrate the release of their new single, we didn’t see it as a reason to celebrate so we got out of there sharpish.

That night my taxi services were called upon, so thankfully the alcohol had worn off by then. My flatmate is a rally driver through hobby, and their car required bringing back to Edinburgh for it’s MOT. So I drove him out to Greenlaw so that he could drive it back, the hour journey down revealed the car still in bits – and at 10pm after the weekend I’d had this wasn’t good news. Eventually the car was ready and we went in convoy back to Edinburgh, arriving at 1am. You can imagine my joy when I returned to the flat to discover my PC had lost the plot while I was away and now was trying to tell me the primary partition was corrupt. The irony was not lost on me as only that afternoon I’d started backing up onto DVD but had only done one test of inconsequential data. I’m really not sure how it all happened, but random files were corrupt and so I had to painstakingly attempt to save what I could from my work and personal files onto a secondary drive (I didn’t trust the secondary partition), giving up around 3am as I could barely see. Yesterday, when the OS completely gave up, I decided to install XP onto the secondary drive, what a good idea! Sadly, probably due to tiredness, in doing so I managed to format the drive - deleting all the files I had rescued as well as all my Apps which I store on that drive so if I did need to format the primary partition I’d have no way of reinstalling my software. Disaster, unmitigated disaster. Cue the lifeline, in my day of randomly trying everything, I noticed a lot of memory errors. So I tried pulling out the memory in the second bay – as if by magic, everything worked including the primary installation of the OS! Putting that chip in on it’s own the boot didn’t get past POST (Power On Self Test) so it looks like the whole thing was caused by a dead DIMM. Removing this allowed CHKDSK to work it’s magic and all is tentatively back to normal, but at 256 meg and having lost all my apps. Drop what you are doing and backup now!