Martin's computer broke.

The computer is a hodge podge of parts going back to '97 and an old e-Machines box they had. I've been the tech support for a while and been able to keep their PC running most of the time.

Recently Martin had problems and it looked like it was time for a reinstall of WinXP. The computer wouldn't boot correctly and I was hoping the reinstall would fix things up. It did not.

I took a look at the computer first hand today and could get nowhere. The hard drive looked unresponsive. The hard drive home came home with me so I could look at it with a couple other tools.

After bolting it into one of my systems, I saw that the drive was a bit fubarred. Partition Magic kept finding read errors and was unable to even diagnose the problem exactly.

I called Martin and told him the drive looked like the data was not salvageable. He said to go ahead and do a clean install. Even with his go ahead, I tried for another 90 minutes to find a way to save the drive. No dice. It's hosed.

As I type, the drive is reformatting for a fresh install. I only hope the problem is fixed with a reformat and it's not the drive going bad...