Well, I figured you were the only people I know who would get what kind of frustration I'm dealing with on this. Here's the deal. A co-worker asked me to do him a favor and upgrade his hard drive for him. I figure, OK, I do him a favor. I get his machine home, crack it open and install the new drive. He is running a PII-400 with an 8Gb drive. Problem one is that it's so farking slow I spend 2 hours cleaning all the spyware/useless crap he's installed over the last 3 years he's had the machine. I finally get Partition Magic installed and set it to copy the primary partition to the brand new 60Gb drive. All seems well until 1.5 hours into the process the thing stops because of a disk inconsistency. Grrr... Ok, no problem. reboot his POS computer back into windoze and run a scandisk. It finds problems and fixes them. I run Partition Magic again. It fails... again. I boot back into windoze and run a thorough scan. 2 hours later I run PM again and this time it works. Takes 3 hours, but it worked. Cool, making headway. I remove the old drive from the machine, set the new drive as single, and reboot. Primary Hard Disk fail. Grrrr... OK, get a new cable. No go. Move it to secondary, No go. Put it back like it was including the old drive. No go. Schitt. Now what? It seems the bios will no longer recognize his hard drive at all. OK, unhook his computer, hook mine back up, look up the bios flash binary, shut my machine back down, power his up, and start upgrading his bios. Halfway through the BIOS update process (you know, after it erased his old bios and before it writes the new one) his machine hangs. Hard. I wait 15 minutes to be damn sure. Yip. You guessed it. His machine is now a very big paperweight.

I guess that'll teach me to help people out. Now I feel responsible. So I call him up, explained that I killed his MoBo, and tell him that I'm really sorry. If he'll buy a P4 power supply, I'll throw this spare MoBo I have here into his machine. Now, instead of just upgrading his hard disk I've just bought him a new MoBo, 512M of ram, and a P4 - 1.4G processor. Then he has the gall to ask me when I would have it ready to pick up. If I could I would have reached out and throttled him over the phone.

Oh well. I'm going to go play a game now. I need to blow something up.