Is it wrong to be kind of pleased it's the wife's laptop this time? Looks like her hard drive went bang, attempting to restore from the recovery disk (why Microsoft? why are we limited to these awful things?) throws drive write errors. Luckily I backed her drive up using True Image, so once the new drive arrives I'll finally get to test a restore (fingers crossed). I did try the TrueImage restore as well which unsurprising threw write errors as well. The most annoying part was having to update True Image, which doesn't patch itself automatically. Without the update every time I'd choose a restore option the laptop would reboot. Now that was interesting. It's linux under the hood, I wish Microsoft would release Windows PE for this sort of thing, that way I wouldn't have to worry about drivers.