I finally got to try out the new cable modem around 9:00 last night after getting the kids to bed. I hooked it up and tried Mary’s email first. Everything worked fine and she didn’t lose any of her mail, so apparently the Time Warner rep screwup was minor. I might also add that they called me this morning to make sure that everything was ok. Nice service.
I assume everything is fine with my email accounts as well, but I’ve been unable to check. I rebooted my machine and started up Outlook. I had to go into one of the email accounts and change the password since it changed when they re-created the main account. As I tried to apply the password change, Outlook went to check the email for that account. It locked up. It’s not unusual for Outlook to lock up on me while retrieving mail, so I simply reset the computer. Lily started crying. I went to deal with her, expecting to come back to a Windows XP login prompt. I came back to “No active partition. Operating system not found.” Uh oh. After running Norton Emergency disk and some of the Windows XP Recovery stuff from the CD, it seems clear that my computer no longer recognizes my boot hard drive. I’ve got two hard drives, the original that came with the machine and one that I added a couple of years ago for extra storage. The original contains the OS and most my programs while the added drive contains most of the important stuff. If the original is in fact hosed, it means that I lose email and not much else. I’m hoping I can resurrect it. Between the modem and this, I must have some sort of increased static charge or magnetic field or something.
The bright spots are that it appears that MCHost finally credited me back the extra money that they charged me and the Mavericks managed to prolong the agony one more game for the Spurs. We’ll see how they do tomorrow night.