Yesterday was going to be a casual Sunday - Liz and Tyler were going to be out for a few hours at a friends baby shower, so I figured I would take advantage of a few free hours and do some minor computer maintenance.

In preparation, I ran out to Fry’s and picked up a shiny new 160gig Seagate drive for only $49 after a $50 mail in-rebate. I figured at this price, I could get rid of the multiple 40 and 80 gig drives that were currently in my machine and when I was done, I could throw a few in some external enclosures for backups, etc. In the past, I’ve always used Ghost to replicate from one drive to another, and the process was fairly simple.

Boy was I wrong this time. For some reason (that’s still unknown to me), I could not get Ghost to copy my main partition properly. Every time the Windows boot logo would appear, the ‘moving cursor’ at the bottom would start up, and then just freeze. After 15 minutes of just sitting there, I came to the conclusion that it was just dead.

I tried 4 more times to replicate the partition. Each time - same result. I finally gave up and ended up doing a full system repave. What was supposed to be a quick 1/2 hour task, turned into a 5 hour ordeal, that I’m still not done with.

Of course after the repave, everything’s running great. Things are snappy once again, some minor ‘weirdness’ has disappeared, and my annual machine rebuild has been put off for at least another year.

This picture on ExplodingDog sums up yesterday better than words do.

Yesterday I was really ready to just put my foot through the monitor, but today I’m a bit calmer about things. It does make me ask a question though, considering that I think of myself fairly computer competent: How on earth would the ‘average’ user deal with this? I can’t imagine what on earth my dad would do if something like this happened to him.