I did this network upgrade of my primary workstation to Windows XP Professional so I could test the deployment that we’re going to use to upgrade the whole company. In the process, I found that the upgrade seemed to have broken some of the software on the computer, so I started looking at fixing it. Eventually I ended up opening a support call with Microsoft because it was just not getting fixed.

I got a support rep on the phone this morning and we started reinstalling certain components to see if we could get things back up and running. At one point I rebooted the machine and saw this message:

The hard drive controller detects imminent failure of the disk. Please backup your data and replace the drive.

Uh oh. I don’t like that at all. But, fine, most of my stuff’s already backed up anyway (at least, the mission-critical stuff is), so I wasn’t too worried. I hit the key to continue booting the machine…

… and it wouldn’t come up. It just wasn’t working. So now I’ve got a new hard drive in the machine and I’m rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.

This is exactly what I wanted to be doing today.