(no subject)

Well, my habit of dragging my laptop everywhere has worked its magic again: this laptop's disk is lsowly dying. Well, two years of filling up an NTFS disk with MP3 without ever defragging is not a good idea to begin with; you end up with too little space to do the defragmentation and an $Mft catalog file that is too big to manage, and won't shink anyway because these catalog files are not designed to shrink. BUt once the harddisk is that b0rked, writing errors do not allow you to use any tool long enough to fix anything.

I had to make an emergency floppy to use the image on the hidden partition to start over on my harddisk. Twice, because the SP1 update and lingering file system problems made my machine unable to boot. I have just installed the 40 critical updates Microsoft recommends for my two year old version of XP on that image.

Still, XP is reporting "write delay" failures. One every 3 hours or so. This system is dying.