So about 5 days after my '20 minute ghosting operation', I have my desktop working and started again. It looks like it needs a bit of a system re-install but that's trivial after the hardware refused to work.

<nerd>
I had an IDE raid card plugged into the bottom PCI slot (of 5) in my motherboard. This was all fine and good and every time I turned on my computer it would take an extra 30 seconds to detect drives. Finally I found a new hard drive (which might not be working but that's another story) and decided to plug one into the PCI IDE RAID card and, in theory, it would just detect and work as normal. Right?
Seeing that the PCI card just stopped detecting at all I figured there was some issue with the card's bios that when it tried to load (which it would do after a drive was plugged in) so it might need to be updated. Did that. Still nothing. So I got pissed off, shut it off and left it for 5 days. Also complained to everyone I saw.

Today while Thei was here I was once again inspired to fix it so I tested the IDE RAID card in my milkcrate and it worked. DAMN! I was hoping I could just chuck it out. So I tested it in a different slot in my pc and it worked still. But I couldn't leave it there because it was resting against the fan for the graphics card. So I moved PCI cards around, started the OS off the HDD plugged into the IDE RAID card and all the hardware just worked. All of this was done because I ghosted my OS install to another drive and installed it. The ghost operation screwed Windows (or Windows screwed Windows) and it doesn't work anyway.
Yay for reinstalling Windows- NOT!
</nerd>

In other news I start my new job next week. A bit of .Net programming will be an awesome change. I shudder to think what kind of computer I'll be working on.

<geeked out! /> Maz