What a day. This morning I woke up to a missing NTLDR that turned out to be a corrupt MBR. I didn’t have an MCE CD because this is a newer HP that wants me to make full drive backups to use for FDISK/Format in lieu of reinstalling. So I tried making a bootable flash card, but couldn’t get it to fly. Then I went down to compusa, where I bought this laptop, thinking they’d have a bootable disc I could use there. No such luck. They had me call HP, who had me run a S.M.A.R.T. test in the bios prior to agreeing to ship an OEM CD.

And then I found the recovery partition (maniacal laugh). Several hours later, and no thanks to long conversations with the darlings in Calcutta who didn’t even MENTION this partition’s existence, MCE is up…