Professor Elam

Sometimes you're the windshield
sometimes you're the but
sometimes you're a louisville slugger
sometimes you're the ball
Mary Chapin Carpenter

Saturday evening I violated a sacred principle

IF it is not broken, don't fix it..

In short I attempted to install  windows xp on a partitioned hard drive in my mac laptop, bad idea.
As always the rule is, do not mix pcs and macs, despite what apple says, that won't work. Keep pc on pc.

Worse than I thought, the procedure managed to erase the entire mac hard drive.

so after 2 hours at the apple store, we managed to re install the apple system sonething I could not have done as I did not have the program.

At this point the Time Machine feature was very helpful. Mac has a unique back up program called Time Machine that actually indexes your work by the day. I had used Time Machine to back up to a 160 gb usb hard drive. Good thing!

So if you are not backing up your computer to a usb hard drive I suggest you do so. I have lost two hard drives on computers in the last month, be safe, not sorry.