Today I performed the first half of the most difficult computer related troubleshooting I've ever attempted. It seems that sometime over the weekend my dad's computer at work acquired a virus which destroyed or corrupted his windows registry file. The 'puter would start loading the bios and boot up fine but once it started trying to load Windows, I'd get the "blue screen of death" and a "uh-oh, you're fucked" type error message. I tried booting in safe mode, booting from disk, running all the little startup config programs and got nothing. I finally went to the Microsoft Knowledge Base and ran a search on the error reference number I was getting. I ran a Scandisk on the HD like it told me and recovered over 100 orphaned files and rebooted, but still got the old blue screen. I was hoping that it was just the registry file that was bad and not everything else (because most of the important company doc's are there until we get the server) so I installed a second version of the operating system so that I could at least check out the other files to see if they were ok. It seemed that they were. I then attempted to copy all the boot and registry files from the new version of the OS to the old version but couldn't since they were obviously in use. I think I probably could have done it from DOS had I known more about it, but when I tried running the Microsoft Recovery Console, it wouldn't even recognize the old OS due to the lack of startup files. Eventually I just bit the bullet and went back to the new version of the OS, reconnected the 'puter to the network and the workgroup and transferred every important document and database I could find over to my office computer for temporary storage. It took me hours to find the god damn Microsoft Outlook .pst file because it was hidden for one, and also for some reason under another usernames Documents and Settings folder. Once I got everything transferred I ran a virus scan on the folder on my PC and then left for the day. Tomorrow is part two, where I reformat the hard drive and reinstall the new OS once again. Then I guess I'll have to reinstall each program as well, and reconfigure the network and user settings once again. After that's all finally done, I can transfer all the important stuff back to where it used to be located. Hopefully making that machine even better than it was before. Then I'll have to schedule some utilities to run each week on that PC since apparently I'm the only one at work that knows dick about computers.

- these thoughts flowed through Jeff's fingers @ 7:36 PM