Still spinning

I ran SpinRite overnight on my C: drive and got it to fire up this morning, loading Windows XP properly.

But it was still shutting down my Blink antivirus software, which turned out to be a consequence of Blink autoupdating corrupted data from the mothership. I got an email from the Blink folks to that effect and it was confirmed by the fact that the Blink software on Maria's computer had also gone wonky.

I followed the instructions and reinstalled Blink, which called for a reboot to complete. I did and it loaded and ran fine.

Then I got a little overconfident and did a shutdown/restart. Windows loaded, but stopped short of displaying the icons, Start button and toolbar. I restarted several times and got the same result. So I now have SpinRite running on my computer and on Maria's machine as well.

I suspect this will end with me buying a new C: drive, moving the old C: drive to a tertiary slot in the box, and reinstalling Windows. I'm reasonably confident I can rescue my programs and data from the old C: drive - I just think Windows may be too corrupted to run on the old C: drive.

Fortunately, I backed up my Quicken and iTunes stuff to my D: drive and also to the new 500GB external hard drive I bought a couple of weeks ago.

The good news is that this takes my mind off of politics and the stock market.