so, i'm still on the chromebook. but, the laptop booted...and everything seems to be where it was....

i have some loose ends to work out before i close this machine back down, but i should be able to spend most of the night on the other machine, catching up on things from the last few days, after i stop to get something quick to eat.

this was not as serious of an issue as the last time this happened, which was after i tried to pop my access to information disc in the machine. all i did to fix this was the following:

1) take the hard drive out of the laptop

2) install the hard drive into the pc in an open slot

3) put a windows 7 disc into the pc

4) boot to windows pe and run a chkdsk /b.

5) boot into windows xp on the pc. yeah. it's fast.

6) copy everything off of the laptop's hard drive onto the pc's hard drive

7) turn the pc off and unplug all of the hard drives in the pc except the laptop's drive.

8) reboot to dvd and install windows 7 to the laptop's hard drive. this rebuilds the boot sector from scratch.

9) once you're up in windows 7, turn the machine off.

10) plug the other hard drives back in, and boot back into windows xp.

11) delete all of the data off of the laptop's install partition, except the registry. save that, just in case. do not format the install partition. do not touch the boot partition.

12) copy the data back on to the hard drive, putting the fresh registry somewhere safe for troubleshooting.

13) it should now boot back to your previous install, on the pc. if there are registry issues, you can fix them via trial and error. this time, there actually weren't any - it just booted up clean.
14) put the hard drive back in the laptop.

i legit lost sunday night, but i was going to spend monday making calls anyways, and i had to do show research for the trip, and i had to get some sleep. so, didn't really lose monday or tuesday. i guess i also lost tonight. so, that's only like ten hours. i've wasted more time on a new york times article.

let's get things in order by early morning, so i can hit the show tomorrow night.