I don't like surprises Aug 7, 2007

I was just talking to

, who recently had an unfortunate incident involving a Windows partition and a dead hard drive. The situation reminded me of something that happened to me freshman year of college, which I've never actually written about here.

I used to dual-boot Windows Me and Red Hat Linux 7. I ended up using Red Hat way more than Windows, so I decided I ought to shuffle around the partition sizes. But I was working on a project for a class, and I didn't want to lose the use of my computer for an hour or so while I resized a partition. I figured there ought to be a utility out there that would let me shrink the Windows partition, at least, and keep working while it was happening.

Well, I found one. Partition Surprise. At the time, version 0.1 alpha. Fool that I am, I installed it and let it do its thing.

Of course, it choked. At about 50%. Leaving my Windows partition completely unusable.

I guess I shouldn't have been all that surprised.