So, about two weeks back I loaded and aimed a large thermonuclear device at my proverbial foot and deleted C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\IOMDISK.SYS. Technically I did not delete it, I moved it to C:\TMP\IOMDISK.SYS, but the effect was about the same: on rebooting my system ground to a halt with error 0x0000007 in some part of the system I was too lazy to write down.

In my history of computing I've been able to do some absolutely bizarre things with data recovery: copying unreadable MS-DOS floppies on an SE-30 with a Superdisk, manually patching a disk sector table (once) to ignore a visibly bad part of the disk (it had a hole in it, damn 5¼ floppies). I had a Thinkpad 240 I bought for commuting to Sydney which had a bad boot sector for most of the time I worked on the Sydney Olympic Games project: I hibernated it instead of shutting it down, and had a spare drive which I (somehow, the neural data has been lost) used to bootstrap the machine when I did shut it down.

I've built Mac System 7 systems using floppies, OS/2 systems using disk images downloaded through an EBCDIC RSCS network and then ftp'd over to a system and yet managed to build (mostly). I gave in and switched to Windows '98 years ago when I could not view the latest www.ibm.com redesign on OS/2 and I'd tired of swapping drives in/out of my 755CE.

I initially set my Thinkpad x31 aside for a week to cool down (as though the rest would allow the bits to magically realign). I then spent about 20 hours farting around with various rebuild options, trying the "recovery" option of Windows XP installation (doesn't work so well with OEM builds I've learned), installing a separate Windows install on the disk (aside from chewing up what little disk space remained, the new install was clueless about pretty much every device on the system including networking. I ended up networking it via Firewire to a Mac Mini).

Before any big trip, even many little trips, I like to back up my data. Now, not one of those fancy rebuild-your-system backups, no, just a simple rsync of most of my data off to a ~300Gb drive. This mostly works, most of my data is under my c:\documents and settings\epc directory (except for Intuit's Quicken which insists on storing data off in \program files\ land). One minor glitch is that rsync (cygwin's rsync) apparently copies over the NT file ownership as well. Luckily this is only recognized by Windows, the Mac happily reads all of the data.

Anyway, I concede defeat. I again spent several hours today trying to resurrect the damn thing and you know, it isn't worth it. Microsoft has made what could have been a relatively easy process a nightmare, and I have better things to do with my time.

Now, while you might expect that I'm going to drop Microsoft like the wet bag of dog excrement that it is, I'll likely buy another Thinkpad with Windows XP on it (because Apple seems incapable of building a laptop that weighs less than 2kg).

But I am declaring data bankruptcy, which is a new term I conveniently made up about twenty minutes ago. In keeping with my earlier rants on keeping too much digital cruft around, too much physical crap around, I'm starting from scratch on the new system (with a couple of minor exceptions for digital IDs).

In Alex's book, Glut, he wrote about how conquering armies would burn the conquered peoples' libraries, destroying their history and replacing it with their own. I concede defeat, Microsoft has conquered my carefully manicured collection of bits and rendered them (nearly) useless. While not quite degaussed, the collective effects of digital rights management, Windows "Genuine" crap, Windows Activation, Adobe Activation (g-d, remember how much time I wasted bringing Acrobat up to a "current" service level?), etc. have rendered my digital library useless.