Bottomless pit

Life To account for my whereabouts last night: About a year and a half ago I invested in a shiny new 120 gig hard disk for my retirement age PC. I'm still running Windows 98 (and hoping to celebrate the decade in a couple of years) and when I installed it initially, Bill's extraordinary machine told me that it would only allow access to 8 gig. I sighed and decided I'd wait until I'd inevitably upgrade before I recieved the full benefit.

'Well' I thought, 'In the olden days sixty pounds was a cheap price to pay for 8 gig.'

But it knawed at me. I kept hearing it spin around inside my PC tower, stopping just before it reached that line, almost like a child who's been naughty at school and has been told that it can't leave a chalk circle as a punishment.

I thought about the problem. I thought about it some more. I thought about what Guy Goma said about how the internet is there "to inform people what they want and to get the easy way and so faster if they are looking for."

So I googled. And I googled again. And I actually found out that there such a thing as a boot disk (really?) and if I used that inconjunction with something else called fdisk (really again?) I could create something called a Primary parition on the drive that would take up the whole drive and that would make it work.

I backed up my data. I backed it up some more. I pretended I was the kind of person who knew what they were doing, selecting options in fdisk and then restarting the machine. Trying something else and then re-starting the machine again. I had my fingers crossed. I went away and watched a pretty average episode of The West Wing whilst my computer had a think about it's direction in life. When I came back, sure enough. It worked. Ain't technology wonderful.

So now I have a hard disk which seems like a bottomless pit. How long to do give for it fill up again?