Flat Out Like a Lizard Drinking

What a busy few of days I've had. On Tuesday I had phone calls from both schools to come and pick the kids up. Alex had a raging headache (possibly from the trip to Griffith on Monday) but after a panadol he seemed to come good. Carly was obviously sick. Sore throat, swollen glands. We couldn't get a doctor's appointment for her until Wednesday so she stayed home from school. It was my day for the canteen at the Primary School on Wednesday too, so I sent Alex to school, did the canteen, left early to get Carly to the doctor. She's got tonsilitis. Alex came home from school Wednesday afternoon saying he had a sore throat and had a runny nose and more headaches. This morning he was so stuffed up I kept him home as well as Carly.

I had the car booked in today for a service, and had organised to fix a friend's computer in Wagga while I waited for the car. Since I had the kids too I re-booked the service, and the kids came with me. They had a ball. Alex discovered a 3-wheeler mototbike that he and Carly fought over all afternoon, while I installed antivirus and a firewall on the computer. We stuffed around for nearly 2 hours with a scanner that just didn't want to work, because Barb (my friend) wanted to know how to attach hand-written quotes to an e-mail. A simple enough request, but after 2 hours I was losing my cool. We were working on a laptop, and because I'm not as familiar with them, I wasn't sure where the problem was coming from. The printer scanned straight to print, but wouldn't scan onto the computer, the splash screen seemed to freeze. I thought it was a memory problem for a while, but then after a couple of shut-down and restarts everything worked properly. I was at a loss to explain what happened, just relieved that it worked.

I've had another friend's computer sitting here since last night, so when we got home and tea was out of the way, I set up the box with all Alex's computer's peripherals. The new box installed monitor and mouse files, and then I added the computer to my network so I could retrieve some files from it before formatting the hard drive and installing XP. At the moment it's running Windows ME (in my opinion the absolute worst of the Microsoft versions). The computer wanted to restart after installing the network so I clicked ok, and when it restarted, I had no primary IDE. The BIOS showed only the CD drive installed.

What a pain in the proverbial. Out with the screwdriver to see if something had come loose inside the box, but everything seemed fine. Power cords and cables all secure, the I unseated then reseated the cables and power cords, plugged it all back in, and nothing. No C drive. I jumped on my (this) computer to search the internet, a million suggestions but nothing new. So I took the hard disk out of the box, added it to Alex's box as a 2nd primary disk, and went straight into the BIOS to see if the disk was recognised, and yes, it's there. So I booted into windows. I got a scandisk warning that the drive had errors and needed to be checked. That was at 9.30pm. 1 hr 15 mins later and 30,000 of 1.2 million clusters later and it's found 2 bad clusters. The file that was on the first bad cluster was the Windows networking CAB. It looks like installing the network has caused the problem. I could be here all night, because scandisk keeps asking permission to fix each bad cluster.