Jane starts her 10-day veggie/vegan detox/diet today. Good luck to her but I'm staying carnivorous

Read my first paragraph in Thai today

"So what!", I hear you mutter.

"Great step for me."

My old 60 GB ipod which I took on the Clipper Race and which got battered about after flying across the yacht after one too many tacks needs a new battery.

Even though the battery was u/s it the iPod was okay to use in the base station up until recently.

Went to the iPod shop in Fortune Town and they said it would be 900 THB for the new battery and to come back in about an hour.

As I was off to my Thai language class I said I'd pick it up later on that afternoon.

A few hours later, supposedly all done, it turns out that the same problem still exists!!!

Back to the shop a few days later and this time I stay there while they do the work. This time I actually get asked some questions, i.e. do I use Windows or a MAC? Do I have a backup of all songs on the iPod, etc.

Obviously nothing was done the first time and they just took the foreigners money!!

This time they did it Still didn't work though

Without boring you with the details it took me a week to recover the entire disk. Would say I got about 95% of it all back and 100% of the important stuff.

A big lesson there is for backups as I'm totally fed up with wasting time with all this crap. I needed a new drive to be able to recover the old one so now will do my best to implement a [fairly] regular schedule

That's me by the way!

Jane was at work early today so having decided to reinstall and readily armed with coffee and my XP Pro dvd I started...

Install was exactly the same as the previous time, took no longer only this time I partitioned at 30 GB for C.

Booted up and Windows starts...now to install the network, graphics, video, audio drivers for the laptop, all of which are safely backed up on DVD and on my 500 GB Western Digital external hard drive...which is still plugged in to the USB port!

It's not visible in Explorer so I 'safely remove hardware', delete the drivers from within 'System' and reboot. On startup, plug the USB cable back in and the popups tell me it has installed and is ready to go

Open up Explorer and...no sign of it?

Okay, no worries, where's the DVD, I can reinstall the drivers from that, then go online and browse the forums...where's the DVD? Not in Thailand!!! I must have left it in the UK - merde!

So, go through the usual fault finding and cannot resolve it so now need some expert assistance.

Unfortunately I have no way of connecting to the internet to download the network drivers which I have to have in order to be able to connect to the internet [via my laptop]

I can however, browse via iPhone.

From posts on various sites, it appears that somehow the Master Boot Record has been wiped/trashed and that's why the problem is as is.

Nothing has been installed to, or deleted from the hard drive so I know from past experience that the data is still there, just got to recover it now...

I do have data recovery software just unfortunate that it is with my recovery disks IN THE UK

...Tomorrow's just another day.

I reinstalled with XP Pro, SP3 and installed the latest Office, Adobe and other 'stuff' and cannot believe the size of some of these applications now: nearly 2GB for Adobe Acrobat Pro!!!

Having partitioned my C drive at 20 GB it was no way big enough so it looks like I may have to do this all again else create additional problems. Ah well, a job for another day.