bigdamnnerd ◾ ◾ we hates the gateses, my preciousss...

So I have 5 Gb of unformatted space on the same hard drive as my C: drive (30 gb drive) which was going to be a Linux partition. But, I have a dedicated Linux box now, so there's no need to dual boot my Windows box.

So I fire up the Drive Manager, and format that 5Gb into a new drive.

One reboot later (unrelated), and "Error loading operating system".

I poke about the interweb on my laptop, and I guess that the MBR got fux0red, but good.

Two or three attempts with the Win2k recovery console (and fixmbr and fixboot) do absolutely nothing. It seems that the 25gb former boot partition is now the F: drive, and the new 5gb drive has claimed C: status. That explains why it couldn't find a OS on the blank (damaged?) 5gb partition).

So, once again, I'm re-installing Windows. On the 5gb partition, so I don't lose anything. And, foolishly, I still have hope that I'll be able to pull off some sort of drive-letter shell game, and reset things to the way they were before.

This is why I do all my real work on OSX and Linux....grrr...