I run a dual boot PC back home. Today I was mucking around with grub and accidentally typed "grub-install /dev/hda1". Kids, never try adding a partition number to the device name. It screwed up my NTFS partition.

I probably could have restored the partition using what seems to be an excelent procedure but I decided to install windows XP from scratch. That is probably the best way to get rid of that rootkit Sony gave me a couple of months ago.

Besides I felt comfortable doing this because I had just back-upped all my important data (documents, application settigs, etc) a few days ago. Its just great that one can write backupscripts with rsync and tar and run them in cygwin. Now it is just a matter of getting some registry settings back. Still an evening worth of work *sigh*.