So I broke out the copy of Partition Magic which our IT guy had given to me many months ago when I first started messing around with Linux at work, and began merrily partitioning left and right. Whee! A 500 MB partition to share happily between Linux and Windows! Is life grand, or what?

But then, of course, came the errors. "Error 302: Cannot write file." "Fatal error in partition: 302".

Um.

Partition Magic told me that it had finished the partitioning, and so I tentatively clicked "Reboot". The computer whirred and buzzed, with very little smoke, and then happily launched Windows.

It took me a few minutes, though, to realize that something really had gone wrong. Normally, when I boot up my computer, I get a LILO boot screen, which lets me decide at boot time whether I want to run Linux or Windows. This time, I got no such screen.

A little bit of digging confirmed my worst fear: in my zest to improve life at work for my Linux computer, I went and zarked Linux.

"Zark" is a technical term, by the way. It means just what you think it means.

Okay, so I got a little over-confident. This won’t be too hard to fix. No, really. I just need to reinstall Linux. And LILO. And hope to God that I don’t fry the Master Boot Record and destroy any chance I might ever have of logging into any operating system at all on my computer. Because the neatest thing in the world is turning on your computer and finding a nice little screen that says, "Operating System Not Found."

Ugh. Can I go home now?