As a guy who’s pretty technical, I don’t like it when the power to fix my computer is out of my hands. Now I remember why I don’t like that feeling.

Last Wednesday I got the little icon in my system tray telling me that Microsoft had some updates for me. I started the wizard and saw that it was Windows XP Service Pack 2. The reason it was so late notifying me about SP2 is a whole other story; suffice it to say that my company likes to run their own patch management, even going to the extent of disabling the Windows automatic updates. Anyway, I’m concerned about security holes on the few occasions when I’m forced to use IE, so I told it to go ahead and install. I would regret this later.

After about an hour, I got an error from the setup saying that I was out of space on my C: drive (where my OS resides) so the installation had to be backed out. Fine. I let it do it’s thing, and all seemed well. Out of curiousity I checked the C: partition; 650MB free. While that didn’t seem like much, I figured it should be enough to install a service pack. Hell, shouldn’t the service pack setup check that first? Whatever. I forgot about SP2 and got back to work.

A while later I went to lunch; when I came back the setup program has resumed(!). I let it run, and again…same error message. This time, though, I got a prompt to clean off the C: drive and uninstall some programs. Once it finished backing out I ran the cleanup utility and uninstalled some old program — less because SP2 told me to, and more to just clear off the space; I should have more free room than that — and got myself to about 800MB free. However, it now appeared that SP2 wasn’t finished backing out (despite all screens having closed some time ago) because there was a prompt on the screen telling me I had to reboot for the SP2 changes to take effect. Ummm…what changes? I thought it just backed out? Now I’m worried; I’d just uninstalled a bunch of 3rd-party programs while SP2 was backing out (for the second time!), having used up every last byte of my C: drive. I walked to the washroom while I thought about what to do next. I would regret this later too.

When I got back, the reboot prompt had defaulted to ‘yes’ and rebooted itself. At least, I can only assume that’s what happened since I wasn’t there to see it; I supposed it’s equally likely that the laptop bluescreened and rebooted on its own. Regardless, the laptop was now fucked. It was now stuck on this cycle: power on –> IBM logo –> Windows startup screen –> black screen –> .5 seconds of blue screen –> reboot. I tried getting in via safe mode, last known good, etc. No go. I managed to freeze the blue screen and it said something along the lines of, “The following service cannot be found: Windows. Please reinstall.” Great.

At this point I had two choices: call the help desk, or try to fix it myself. Now I’m no technical genius, but I know my way around a Windows install and I’ve rescued more than a few PCs that looked beyond repair. However, this isn’t technically my laptop. At the very least, even if I couldn’t recover the OS, I could open the case and slave the drive to my own, and pull off all my files so that they weren’t lost.

Right now you may be asking, “Why don’t you back up your files, you idiot?”. Aha, a good question indeed. The answer is this: because my company only gives us 100MB of secured network space each. 100MB. I have presentations bigger than that, fer chrissakes! I also don’t have a CD burner, and my memory key (which I bought with my own money) is only 128MB. The only backup that was ever done was when a tech support guy created a Windows Backup task that backed up my E partition to my…C partition. And I wonder why C: was nearly out of room. So that’s why I don’t back up much of anything.

So, back to my crisis: I had to either open the laptop up myself and copy the files off, or I had to get tech support to do it. Again, it’s not my laptop, so I probably would’ve voided any number of lease agreements and/or warranties had I done so. Reluctantly I called the helpdesk. After a couple of helpful suggestions (“Um…have you tried rebooting?”) they raised a ticket for a tech to come see me. At this point I’ve lost a day’s work.

The next morning someone came by and took my laptop away; she promised to call me when the files were being backed up so that I could be there, to make sure everything was saved. I was able to use a nearby test server as my PC for the day, but I didn’t have access to my work files, bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc. That afternoon another tech showed me that he’d copied my work files to a temp machine and would put it back on my laptop as soon as he’d re-imaged it. He was actaully very nice, but seemed only moderately competent (when I asked him to install IIS on the laptop, he gave me a blank look) so I got a bit worried. The next afternoon I got my laptop back. It has not gone well. Here’s the damage:

• An entire folder is missing off my E: drive, which contained about 300MB of research files
• All my Firefox bookmarks are gone. This one is mostly my fault; I haven’t yet figured out where Mozilla puts their bookmarks. This is a giant pain in the ass as many of my company’s intranet sites are impossible to find (search engine anyone?) and now I’ll have to go on multiple quests to find them again.
• They gave me a Windows 2000 image. Seriously. Windows 2000. I remember now why I never liked Win2k.
• I’m running Office 2000. This means I can’t open all the Access files I run for my own personal & test apps, though at least PHP can still read them.
• Many of my RSS feeds are gone. It’s been a while since I exported my FeedDemon groups to OPML files. It also took me a while to set up all the watches again.
• Lotus Notes (yes, we still use Lotus Notes; how quaint) is screwed up in many tiny ways
• I had to reload all 1250 MP3s. Umm…that’s nobody’s fault really; I told him not to bother with those.
• In general I’ve spent a couple of days trying to get my laptop back in operating condition. It’s still not there, 6 days later.

I would’ve been better off just taking the case apart, pulling off my own files over the course of a day or two, and then handing it over. Now if you’ll pardon me I have to go customize the toolbars in Excel, and after that I plan to pray for sweet death.