It was a nice friday evening. I mean, I was sick and all, but everything else was in place. The birds roosted as usual, the sun set, the guy selling flowers had a good sale….I woke up from my noon siesta (came back early frm work thanks to my cold) and turned on my computer. Suddenly got the bright idea of deleting my Linux partition. Why did I get that idea?

Well, a few months ago, when I wanted to discover Linux and have a hands on experience, I was wondering how I would be able to get a distro. At that noob stage, any distro would have sufficed. I had absolutely no clue as to who would be selling/giving Linux distros and I was very much in the dark. Linux felt like a far out dream. I then stumbled upon Suse on the net and discovered that a personal edition was available for download. Thus, my first ever Linux distro became Suse 9.1 Personal Edition. Suse was sweet. Installation was a breeze and I loved my tux.

That was then. As of now, I have the following distros -

Debain Sarge (2 CDs)
Fedora Core (2 CDs)
Suse 9.1 Pro (5 CDs)
Knoppix 3.2 (Live CD)

Its amazing how I came from zero to here within such a short time. Be careful what you wish for they say….

Anyways, in my enthu to check out Suse Pro, I deleted my existing Linux partition and rebooted my system. I knew what was to come, coz I had seen it happen before. Grub, my boot loader, complained of a missing kernel. All I had to do to correct this was pop in my Windows 2000 CD and go to recovery console and type FIX MBR. So I happily booted my Windows CD and came to recovery console. And what it is that I saw? Windows asking me for Administrator password. HELL! I had forgotten the admin password!!!!

I miserably tried many combinations and permutations to get the password right. Didn’t work. After every three misstyped passwords, I had to reboot into Windows setup What a horrible fuckup!

I had to re-install Windows. Then, I had to back up my data (re-installing windows was the only way that I could think of reaching the data on the my C drive). After backing up my data, I had to do a clean format and again re-install Windows from scratch. Can u believe that!!! $*!(%)@!

Of course, from there I went on to install Suse Pro 9.1. I also spent all of saturday updating my Windows. Hell!!