Yesterday, I wrote a quick program to scan through the directory lists of my original drive and the backup copy, then let me know where the differing files were. Turns out the extra files in the backup copy were from instances where there was a corrupted file on the original drive; the directory simply stopped listing at that point. Weird.

Anyway, with great trepidation, I started the WinXP install process on my C: drive, to format it and make it bootable. It gave me the BSOD about 75% of the way through the install, because of the two soundcards I have installed (the native SBLive! driver can't handle two cards). So I pulled the drives back out, reattached them to Karen's machine, wiped out everything that had just been installed (and discovered in the process that Microsoft got rid of the DELTREE command), xcopied everything back over from the backup, then reinstalled the drives into my machine.

I left the case open, because the best way to guarantee that something goes wrong is to put the cover on and screw it in. And it worked perfectly. (Well, almost. It told me that the Recycle Bin was corrupted, and asked if I'd like to delete the files within. Big deal.)

Ran a benchmark on the C: drive, and found that I'd brought it up to just over half the speed of the D: drive. Not sure why the numbers still seem so low (it's 5400 RPM, <9.0µs transfer, whereas the D: drive is 7200 RPM, <8.5µs), but it's a damn sight better than what it was before.

And now, the sound of John Denver being strangled.