FUCK

This morning before I went to bed I had the bright idea to try and install Plop Boot Manager to my hard drive's MBR, so that it would control the boot process instead of the Windows boot loader.  It offers a lot of extra capabilities, hence why I wanted it.

Except that trying to install it fucked up my partition table.

Fucked up partition table = BIOS no see OS = Can't use computer.  Simple as that.

So when I woke up, I j-j-jammed in my WinXP install disc and reinstalled XP.  All was fine, except for one thing that I swear I've fixed before but can't remember for the life of me how I did it: my boot drive was K: instead of C:.  One of my other hard drives had taken over the stupid C: drive letter.  And with Windows being so infinitely intelligent, you can't use its own disk management software to change the drive letter of your boot drive.  It won't even entertain the thought of queueing it up as something to do when the computer is restarted and then telling you "Reboot your computer, moron!".

In the process of rebooting and trying to get it fixed, my BIOS started doing its thing again, where it goes "lol what IDE Primary Master?  I see no IDE Primary Master!".  Usually if I just turn the computer off and let it sit for a while to think about what it's done, when I turn it back on it goes "lol jk" and starts up.

That was several hours ago.  Letting it sit has never taken more than 20-30 minutes before.

So I go "okay, might as well see if it's the hard drive" and swapped it out for what appears to be a brand new 120GB hard drive that had never been formatted before.  Start up computer, and it still can't see it.  In other words, suspicion confirmed, it's my BIOS.

First thing you're thinking is "lol, you still use IDE devices?"  Yeah, yeah.  I built that computer in 2004.  You know, before SATA became really popular.  Hell, it's got a 64 bit processor.  I've never been able to use it at full power because I've lacked a 64 bit OS for it to run.

My plan was, if the 120GB drive magically worked, I was going to partition it about half and half, and set up Windows on one half and one or another flavor of Linux on the other half.  But that doesn't mean much now, I can't use the damn thing.

All I can hope for now is to earn enough money from this job that I can buy the stuff for an all-new computer.  Which will take very uncomfortably longer than I really want it to.  If anyone I know is reading this and you have even a semi-decent computer you can lend to me for a while, I'd be really grateful.  I'd want to be able to install stuff on it though.  Stuff meaning my usual day-to-day setup, rather than me being a retard and FUBAR'ing your computer.

I should have just gone to sleep at 4:30 AM like I wanted to, but noooo, I was just like "lol let's install plop to the MBR!  This won't take very long!"  Well, half of that was correct.  It didn't take very long.  But now due to circumstances entirely unrelated to it, I can't even use my computer at the moment.

I'm downloading the latest Ubuntu livedisc, I'm going to see if I can't boot off of that and not have to use my parents' computer.  I won't be able to watch anime (sadface), but...  At least I'll have the internet.