the thing about computers....

they suck! well perhaps not always the computers themselves, but the software that we use!

i have a couple of partitions on my hard drive which i decided to merge back into one. partition magic happily displays that this is possible, and going through the process all looks fine. ok, ready to start the process. no warning messages saying that if something doesn't go right then all data will be lost, nothing suggesting that it was about to perform a highly critical task and that there might be a possibility that it wont work, nope nothing.

half an hour later, and 5% through the process of merging an error occurs. no message for the error of course! rebooting the computer and then jumping back into partition magic to my joy it suggested that after a "power failure" (yeah sure, that's what it was!) "it has found that a merge was unsuccessful, but it had set restore points and would be able to restore everything the way it originally was. i select yes and off it goes. that was over 24 hours ago. no more messages, nothing. did i mention that both partitions are no longer visible. i'm now missing 65gig of available hard drive space! i don’t really care that i have lost all my old data, i do care that i now have 65gig less space!

so not all software that suggests that it can perform tasks seamlessly tells the truth. lucky i didn't "pay" too much for that software!