I've had a day of it. It started beautifully, and then I went to C\Bedford
and spent #100.00 or near enough on consumables like CDs, boxes, pens,
printer inks, 8cm CD-Rs, and things of that ilk.
    Got home and started a Norton Ghost backup of the hard disk - all 40GB
of it. That ran through fine until the end about 3 hours later (and 14
CD-Rs). Then it wouldn't boot XM. Ho-hum.
    Put in the XM CD and repaired the OS - fiddlesticks! nothing worked.
Formatted the hard disk and tried to restore the system from the CDs. CRC
failures. (on the same CD that wrote it). Waste of 14 CDs and three hours.
    Now I've formatted the hard disk again and started from scratch again.
That means I only have about 60 MB to download again from Microsoft and
have to go through the mausea of activating it yet again.
    Anyhow this time I've left a 1 GB partition on the hard disk that can
be either for Win98 or Dos or OS/2, depending which is less trouble to
load. Win98 sounds favourite, but it would be nice to get OS/2 running
again on a decent machine.
    I hope this will solve the FidoNet problem. It should.
I'm dreading downloading all that stuff again. Fortunately I saved most of
my non-windows downloads to CD, so it's not as bad as it could be.
    I wonder if this is going to be the last disaster?

Best wishes,
Bill.

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