Who's idea was this then?

XP is a funny fucker, I swear. Yesterday the beast was refusing to boot, at all, ever. Nothing. Zip. No BSOD, just sits there staring at me with a blank expression on its silly face. So I thought, right, you there, have a format. Sadly I needed some files off me hdd, and with it not booting there was not a chance in hell of that happening, so I thought, ahh I'll do a repair so I can boot up into it, copy all me files off, then do a proper format and get back to a nice clean XP.

Errrrr no, refused to get past 34%, installing devices, sit, stare, hdd stops chuntering, all goes deathly quiet.... darn, right, restart.

Setup is restarting, goooooooooood away we go then, sit stare, quiet. Bugger, a swift google reveals that this is usually down to some hardware going pop, fiss, smoke and windows can't identify it and stops. Ok.... which bit has gone bang then? Removed card after card after card, disabled everything I could lay my sweaty mits on in the BIOS and no, XP still wasn't having any of it.

More googling reveals it may be a CD drive or hdd that's failed. CD and DVD I don't mind, I get a bit twitchy when hdd's start going clunk behind my back though. So I disabled first one drive, then the other keeping one going for the XP installation, nothing. Unplugged my second hdd, nothing. Bugger this I thought, there's only one other thing it can be, and that's the first hdd, and that's not clunking so I refuse to believe its that.

Plugged everything back in, enabled all the gubbins back in the BIOS and went to bed, confused, annoyed and rather upset XP had managed to beat me.

Got up this morning and turned the computer on, restarted setup from scratch and errr it works... still a repair jobby though, not a full format, just so I can grab me files off. Blasted thing. God I love XP. (mutter)