NP: Meet The Press

The good news is I've got what looks like a stable backup of my C: drive. I did flip the "ignore bad sectors" switch, and I don't know if the restoration CD will work for the same reason the Windows setup CD won't work, so I'm taking it with a grain of salt. But if I reinstall Windows (and then Norton Ghost) onto the machine, I should be able to eventually get everything back on to either the old drive or the new drive.

What led to the "breakthrough"? A co-worker mentioned defragmenting the drive, which could conceivably relocate some of the important Windows files away from the damaged sectors on the disk. And then I finally read through the Ghost documentation, which recommended running CHKDSK "four to six times" if the backup process failed. So I ran both the defragmentation and disk checking utilities about three or four times in succession yesterday, and it looks like it worked.

Not only that, I feel like I "defragged" my apartment. Some of this was a "bigger hard drive" in the form of the new shelves, to extend the metaphor, but the net result is that there seems to a place for everything now. I still might replace the one big shelf with another small one, effectively throwing away about $80 because I didn't prepare well enough, but if that's the price of finally having this place feel like I live here, I can deal with it.

I still have a loveseat in my dining room, but I can't place another ad at a lower price until my desktop machine is running again. I'll give that about two weeks before looking into consignment or straight-up donation.