on the suggestion of my boss, i decided to repartition my work laptop hard drive. i got this laptop from him and he had a linux partition on the laptop as well as a windows one. the linux partition (which i didn’t have access to) was taking up valuable porn work-related hard drive space and i needed to free up some memory.

the big download that i had been getting basically ate up all the free hard drive space so i needed to find more space. i have never resized a partition before AND kept the data intact, i always just reformatted, but because this was a work laptop, i decided to try to resize it without losing all of the data.

having never done it before, i did a little research and decided to use this linux boot disk and use a program called QtParted which is a free clone of partition magic.

it SEEMED straightforward enough. delete the linux partition, resize the windows partition, and you should be done…or so i thought.

when i rebooted, i was greeted by a “grub>” prompt. uh oh. i didn’t know exactly what that meant, but i knew that we weren’t in kansas anymore, toto.

i tried to set the active partition, i tried to do this and that, and i think it boiled down to the fact that the partition that had the info on how to boot the machine was just removed so the laptop didn’t know what to do.

i then had to sheepishly ask the IT department for a windows CD to try and fix things. the conversation went something like:

me: uhhh, hi, mr. IT guy. can i get a copy of the windows install CD?

IT guy: you need the windows CD?
me: uhhh…yeah.
IT guy: why do you need the windows CD?
me: oh, you know, i’ve always wanted to see what one looked like.
IT guy: well, let me see if i have one around…so i got it and i was trying to fix things when it asked for the Administrator password. uh oh. now i knew i was in trouble. i tried guessing what the password was and tried all these combinations but nothing worked. finally i had to fess up to the IT guy what kind of trouble i had gotten myself into.

1) i, uhhh, resized a partition on my laptop.
2) errr, without backing anything up.
3) and uhhh, i might have broken things, but i don’t think i did.
4) oh yeah, and i didn’t tell anyone what i was doing, but you know, it should be ok, right?so he goes and peers intently at the password prompt, ponders for a moment what it may be, and GET THIS, he hits the enter key.

let’s let that sink in for a second.

HE HIT THE *ENTER* key. no password. NO PASSWORD.

i’m not sure what was worse. me not thinking of that or there being no password for the admin account. either way it hurts my brain.

but everything is fixed and all is well.

yay.

i can work again.

err.. boo.