Broken, Recovered and Fixed

Not necessarily in that order however. Today has been a rather frustrating day in PC land. Since bringing my PC back from Sheffield, I have had to reinstall windows XP after it refused to dual boot with the existing Windows 7 installation. This problem is my own fault since I installed it afterwards and thus knackered the boot loader. When I did go to reinstall it however, I came across two problems. The first was a lack of blank CDs so I ended up scrabbling around online for a way to make a USB memory stick bootable to install XP. I did eventually find one such method with a program called PeToUSB and although it was slightly different to the usual setup process you have with a CD, it worked fine.

The second problem I came across was that after installing XP, my Windows 7 partition refused to boot - I assumed this was because of the bootloader problems and so I tried repairing it with the Windows 7 disk. For some reason it didn't recognise the partition as a Windows 7 partition. It was then that I realised my mistake... I had installed XP onto the working Windows 7 partition which has now been lost.

At this point I was getting rather angry with myself and the incompatibility of not only Microsoft's software but also my TV card which has been discontinued and thus drivers are only available for Windows XP - and the 32bit version at that. Onwards and I decided that this time I would be certain not to make a mistake by unplugging the Windows XP disk so that I couldn't overwrite it. Installation of Windows 7 didn't take long and I decided that it would be quicker to use Windows Easy Transfer from my laptop to copy over any customisations I had made to save time. This ended up landing me with a corrupt profile that refused to install Adobe Air applications and crashed explorer.exe every time I tried to open control panel or my computer. At this point, I had installed all of the programs which took several hours and I was now too infuriated to carry on and so I left the computer recovering the data from my step-dads drive.

On a more positive note, I found out today that I passed the IBM aptitude test and am 'through to the next round'. Scary stuff indeed - I now need to think about buying a suit for interviews.