As I said earlier, I have a PC with two hard drives. On one drive I had Windows XP and on the other drive I tried Windows Vista and then Windows 7 beta. I use BIOS to decide which drives loads first and that determines which OS runs.

As win7 seemed to be working with my Steam games, I tried to copy my save games from the XP drive (D:) to my win7 drive (C:). win7 gave me an odd warning about not having permission to read these files and asked me if I wanted permission. I said yes, time passed, the files moved.

A week later I tried to run XP, and it had the swine flu. The first symptom: waiting forever after i gave my password and it says loading your settings... Other symptoms: no task bar; Explorer wont let me copy files; Steam wont run because of a pkg error.

Win7 horked my PC but I was not sure how badly.

I went back to the XP installation CD and ran the Repair Console. Unfortunately I dont really know how to use the repair console so I just ran chkdsk and that showed no errors.

I used the XP installer to do a repair installation. This basically installs all the Windows XP files all over again but leaves the registry and the disk contents intact.

The repair installation made progress. My system would boot again and the taskbar was back and I could copy files. But things just didnt work right.

Steam still would not work. On the forums, it indicated that I should download some Microsoft installer tool but when I tried to download it, I got errors. It looked like I no longer had permission to access /TEMP folders...

Wow. Trying to copy files from one disk to another with Windows 7 really f@cked my PC. I am guessing this is a security feature. It detected that the users on both drives was different (different OS's) and then tried to "fix" it for me, breaking my access to the D: drive in the process.

Ugh. Note to self: Dont copy files between disks anymore.

So I went back to the installer, wiped my hard drive, and did a clean install of Windows XP, complete with registration, Windows Genuine Advantage, service pack 3, a bunch of patches and drivers.

Now after installing XP twice in a single day, my machine seems back to normal. Oh brother.