Clean is good, a mantra I have recently accepted. This is mostly because through a laborious process which failed, I lost my main partition. The last incarnation of this system had partitions setup for Windows 98, Windows 2000, linux, a linux swap file and a FAT32 data partition (MP3s, thanks). No matter how hard I tried, I could only boot into linux using a boot disk. The Windows 2000 bootloader was not smart enough to load it. Originally, I had Red Hat 6.2 installed. Feeling adventurous, I decided to install CAEN linux instead. Who wouldn't want to run a distribution of linux created at their own university?! For some odd reason, CAEN tried to use my network card at IRQ 0, which just does not work. Also, since it is based on Red Hat 6.1, it did not properly recognize my GeForce video card. Screw that, time to go back to Red Hat 6.2. Oops, now that is trying to set my NIC to IRQ 0! Screw that, lets go with linux Mandrake. The NIC was properly configured for IRQ 5, but it still wouldn't see my gateway. I figured I could work on that later. I got x windows working just fine, but by this point I figured I should get some work done. Since all of my course hyperlinks were stored in Windows 2000, a quick reboot should get me going. Reboot, walk away, come back to linux. WTF? Reboot, wait for my Windows 2000 bootloader menu to show. Linux. WTF?! Reboot, look for any promising signs, boot into linux. Try to mount my windows partition, get weird errors about bad disklabels and superblocks. At this point, I knew what the outcome was. My C drive got fried by Linux Mandrake because it was not smart enough to ask me where I wanted the boot information. All of my documents from the past year, all my conversations, anything: GONE. Oh well, nothing I can do about it now....