When you arrive home from a conference (which you were, of course, smart enough to bring your Mac to), and find that your Windows laptop won’t boot because in the process of doing absolutely nothing while you were away, the hard disk failed catastrophically (grr-click, grr-click, type fail), and the other disks you have laying around all are formatted with GPT partitions, which the windows installer fails to recognize…you need to:

1. Enter the repair console in the Vista boot disk
2. type “diskpart” to enter the partition utility
3. type “Sel disk 0″ to select the main drive in the laptop
4. type “clean”
5. type “exit” and try again with the installer and it will work.

I actually needed to do quite a few more things, mainly involving Google and writing run on sentences in my blog — but you get the idea.

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