Ain't nuthin gonna burst the bubble.

. . . although, it seems like someone is trying.

Friday at work, I had to uninstall and reinstall our mandated hard-drive encryption software on my laptop. Uninstallation went just fine, but installation was another matter. It started the installation wizard, and then failed without explanation. (It did offer the useful message "installation failed" before crapping out.) I then decided to fall back on the classic Windows troubleshooting step, so I rebooted. That, it turned out, was a mistake.

I got the usual IBM splash screen, followed by a friendly cursor that did nothing but blink. Hmmmm. Left a message for Tom, my favorite guy in the Service Center, and then went over to LAN to see if there was a Windows CD around. My favorite LAN admin wasn't around, so I tried the guy in the cube next to hers, which I should know by now is a mistake. At his usual priggish best, he informed me that it sounded like I'd have to get ol' Lappy reimaged. Yeah, right. (It needs to be done for other reasons, but I wasn't really in the mood to lose my PC for a week right at that moment.) Fortunately, one of the service center techs happened to show up at a cube near mine a short while later. It took a while to explain to him that yes, I'd be able to fix it, and no, it wasn't yet encrypted, because it failed during installation, not during the encryption process. (I understood his dismissive tone when I said I just needed a CD to fix it; techies are always dealing with people who think they know what they're doing, and who usually don't.) After about half an hour, I followed him downstairs and got a CD from him.

It took about an hour and a half to run CHKDSK from the recovery console, after which I wrote a new boot sector and was back in business. All in all, I lost about three hours, and I still have to get the damn encryption software reinstalled. Oh well.

My next challenge was on Saturday with my home PC. I bought a new 160 GB hard drive, which I was planning on using for both extra storage and as a safeguard against disk failure. I was going to set a 40 GB partition on the new drive to mirror my original drive. Simple enough, no? No.

I converted my drives to dynamic disks and was asked to restart. It wouldn't reboot. Great. I pulled the new drive, and it booted, but immediately logged me out every time I logged in. Freaking great. I spent about two hours fighting with it and doing Google searches before calling it a night.

As a change of pace from computer problems, my car decided to kak on me overnight. I was doing the route, for which I use the old Lumina van. About a quarter of the way through the route, either the radiator or a hose (I hope the latter) gave up the ghost and decided to dump all the coolant out on the ground. Neat! I had to call Amanda to wake the kids and come get me. We finished the route barely before deadline. Sometime today, I need to figure out what to do about that POS. With the new job involving a lengthy commute (south Minneapolis to Arden Hills), I now can't actually decide to junk it.

After getting home, I went through the Windows recovery process on my PC, which took about an hour, and completely failed to produce any results.

So, I've unplugged the original drive and am in the process of installing fresh on the new drive. Just what I was planning on doing this weekend. I find it a little ironic that my main motivation in getting the new drive was to protect my important data, and the process of trying to get it set up put that data in jeopardy. I love Windows.

All that, and I'm still riding high, buoyed by the thought of my new job. Right now, there's not much that can kill my buzz.