Whoops! There went XP.

Wednesday.

There I was in the Hole in the Ground with Merl talking about this and about that and then I asked him about getting rid of cookies.

There's a Firefox plugin he tells me so off I go and install it. All is going to plan until suddenly Firefox locks up. It's late so instead of fiddling I just switched off, unplugged everything and went to bed.

This morning I'm without hard drive. Normally I run two - today the bios isn't recognising the slave drive and the main drive won't boot into XP.

What I should have done was disconnect the slave drive that wasn't being identified by the Bios - but I didn't - I tried a repair of XP using the installation disk.

Three hours later I decided to cut my losses and reinstall on top of the existing version.

By about 5pm I've got into XP and rescued my emails etc so I decide to put the slave drive in as a master and see if I can do a FDISK /mbr on it. Rescue disks in drive A can't find the hdd and I've got thousands of photographs from all my holidays etc. on it as well as loads of software - I'm suicidal by this point.

Finally I give up and reconnect the master drive and the slave for some unknown reason. I reconnect the power and switch on and bugger me if the bloody thing doesn't boot straight into XP and then announce that it has found new hardware for me.

The damn drive has reappeared along with all the photos and software.

Of course the software's no longer linked to XP's registry so I've got to go through everything again and reinstall what I can.

Half my password files have disappeared with the XP reinstall on the master drive.

Oh well it keeps me off the streets.

I know exactly what Merl will say. Something about a Mac I expect.