Well, today was a very lousy day because it started like this: Shortly before I usually go to bed (at 2 am usually) I decided to install a second win xp on my system. I should explain that I host a linux and Win XP 64-bit on my computer and there are certain things that don’t work on the 64-bit edition of Windows and there is no hope it ever will. E.g. Logitech doesn’t offer drivers for very old mice and keyboards (iTouch Software and MouseWare) on 64-bit, it’s hard to get 3Com Gigabit 3C940 adapters running and you can’t play some games. One of them is “Beyond Good & Evil” which is one of the greatest games I ever played btw. However, I had tried to run it through a Windows Live CD (BartPE(german)) with 32-bit XP but that didn’t work so I decided to free up 6 GB on my second hdd and install a 32-bit XP along with the 64-bit one. Well I installed it and everything worked well until I entered the new system and wanted to activate it. It’s a legal copy I obtained through university and I have a valid product key but the system wouldn’t accept it because “it had been used too often”. “too often” equals exactly one time as I remembered installing it on my laptop once. However I also own a copy of XP Home that came with the laptop and for this wasn’t used atm I decided to install it instead. Big mistake!!

When the setup presented me the drives to choose (which wasn’t as easy to get to because I needed to install special drivers for the setup to work with the VIA SATA device) there was only one partition left on my first hdd and it said ‘unallocated’. I don’t know how it did that but my whole parition table on the first harddisk -with my XP 64 system- was gone. Well, to shorten a long story, it took me all the day to find software to re-establish the partition table (try TestDisk, it’s free and it’s on the Ultimate Boot CD). My ext3-partition where my kubuntu used to be installed is gone forever but my Windows works again.

I now can play “Beyond Good & Evil” but I truely think I was there today in rl…