I guess it's one of those days.. I needed to move my stuff from one drive onto another and not surprisingly, there was trouble ahead. All the partitions containing docs, software, install files etc moved along just fine, did a simple rsync in linux. The Gentoo partitions were just as well behaved, they took to their new homes with no questions asked but then comes the big, ugly monster: the Windows partition. I had never tried copying one before and I didn't think too much of it, I thought as long as I got all the files across it would be all good. Not so fast! Copying the files over in linux failed miseably, I ended up with a corrupt, unbootable Windows (apparently there's more to a fat32 than meets the eye, at least as far as Windows is concerned).

A quick search on google revealed that I might be more successful with Norton Ghost so I tried that then, and voilá it seemed to work fine. At this point I was quite impressed and relieved that I had been able to transfer the beast without reinstalling all my software. I had set up all my partitions on the new drive and was ready to format the old one when it somehow turns out the Windows install isn't in good shape at all. Once I plugged out the old drive, the new one was left with the exact same boot handicap I discovered earlier. Quite puzzling that was, I thought I had been booting from my new drive all this time, there was nothing to suggest otherwise and apparently Windows had been consulting the old drive just the same. Talk about disturbing behavior under the hood.

Well there was no way back, the old drive had been wiped and the new wouldn't boot. Windows installer, here I come. Basically, I had spent 3 days trying to avoid this boring, drawn out, horrible process and I ended up having to go through with it all the same. Thank you so very f. much, Redmond!