I finally found my install CD to repair files today. It was buried in my media archive, the four boxes of CDs, books, DVDs, RPGs, cards (tarot and CCG), and @DEITY knows what else that still reside in the garage. Yup. A significant portion of my stuff still hasn't been unpacked in over a year.
So. Anyway. I get back to trying to repair this damn thing. Pull out all the stops, rack my brains, all that sort of thing. And I realise something mid-Google. I'm looking up things I used to know. My Windoze skills are leaving me. This makes me a very, very happy bunny, but it dows not leave me with a 'doze platform available to test things on.
I know I can reinstall. Clean up everything that's presently on the machine, get rid of the old text files stuck allover the place like post-its from another me, wipe out the duplicates and the dregs of my porn stash that evaded deletion by my forgetting where to look. Expand the current partition that Debian's sat on and port things across, make a sane filing system and leave myself with a testbed W2K system because WINE pisses me off and I like games.
I know I have to do something to it. But I don't look forwards to doing so. This 98 install has been going without major incident for more than 3 years, and in some perverse way going for so long without reformat is a major achievement.
[0]: Though not from DriveThruRPG.com. It's a convoluted rant that boils down to "Thanks but no thanks". I'll stick with www.rpgnow.com, which offers real PDFs that I can do exactly the same with as I could a book I bought, without needing a decoder ring only available for shit-tastic proprietary OSen.
Fuck, I said I wasn't going to rant. Sorry.