LANparty

So today I planed to visit a LAN party near by.
I installed a new Window and the whole crap that is needed to talk about a proper working one. Then I had to change some partitions to have enough space for the games.
The job was actually quite easy: remove hda2 (which was used as a backup partition for my suse configs and homes) and make the unpartitioned space a FAT or NTFS. Sounds easy - wasn't. I removed the partition and tried to make a FAT in Windows - no way - after making the FAT I wasn't able to access it, since explorer always died while fetching some information about the partition (actually one never knows what that thing is doing). Anyway - I booted Kubuntu - removed the FAT and tried again with Partition Magic. Wanna guess what happened? >>Error 701<<
Beside that this told me exactly nothing about what the error actually was it just annoyed me - I was fed-up with that Window crap and rebooted. And then the unbeliveable happened - grub declined to start. <> I thought and searched for the Kubuntu Live CD. I booted it - wanted to mount hda1 to chroot it, but mount declined to mount. So what does a Linux user think if something doesn't work? Well, <>, so I started fck.reiserfs --check /dev/hda1.
And it told me that my partition is totally dead and I might rebuild the whole tree. So I've done. It took me about 2 hours to 'rebuild' and in fact I ended up with an empty partiton which was at least mountable. So after I freaked out because of a "it seems like I lost all my files" thought, I noticed the lost+found dir and checked it. Actually I included my whole system (some parts usable, some others not, some path structures existing, some others not).
As I'm wirting this I put the rebuilt stuff (actually my complete home afaik) over to my other harddisk. So installing a new Window and preparing for a lan party ended-up with an aprox. dataloss of 70-80% and lotz of wasted hours. I love that!

So I'll grab the PC as soon as the moving has finished and install a new Kubuntu at the lan party's place.
Conclusion of this day is that I'll never install a Window again - and therefore will spend even more time with putting Linux and the Free Desktop in general to the same Level as Windows is (talking about driver, games and user counts of course).