I just spent over six hours trying to boot a PC and get it properly configured for... children's games. Yep, at this very moment John Paul is playing Freddi Fish -- and has been at it for over an hour. Well, at least the effort was worth it.

But the roadblocks strewn in my path!

First, it won't boot properly. Meaning, it won't boot at all. I keep landing in IBM's hard-coded error/testing screens. I messed around with the configuration until it finally booted -- probably a fluke, but there was plenty more to come. Once booted, I reached for an OS update, which went fine until the HD ran out of space. Odd, I thought -- I don't remember this HD being only 2 Gb in size.

Well, it hadn't been. I had to find the boot partition and activate the rest of the drive. Oh, and format it. All of which I did. Then I did the rest of the OS updates, rebooted, and got... an error.

So I looked up the error messages online. They all seemed to have one thing in common: check the voltage on the backup battery. Screw that -- I went to the old-and-busted ThinkPad I've been cannibalizing and ripped the backup battery from there. Installing that cleared most of my errors.

Except for the one about NTLDR being missing.

More online searches revealed a plan to copy some W2K files onto a floppy disk (a floppy disk!), boot from that, then copy the missing files.

The boot part work (whew!), but the missing files weren't missing. So WTF?

More poling around revealed that by activating the D: drive on that earlier partition work I'd de-activated the C: drive -- where the OS lives.

That cleared it all up. I set up a restricted-rights user for the boys (who have a habit of claicking randomly on everything, hitting keys, and totally fucking up a configuration) and installed Freddi Fish. Which leaves me here. Blogging. With the Simpsons on in the background. And a bottle of port in the kitchen, calling my name.