#*@%!

My computer, which was working fine yesterday, gave unable-to-hibernate errors last night and isn't booting today. Just a perpetual blinking cursor. BIOS tests seem to suggest that memory and HD are working so I HOPE it's just a corrupt MBR and nothing more, or this is going to be a really frustrating trip. I've planned on doing roughly two weeks worth of work during the three week trip, and there are strong business reasons not to back down from that.

Kristiana is downloading an Ubuntu Live CD to burn for me which should give me more tools to diagnose the problem - and to fix it if the MBR theory is correct.

The worst case scenario in which I buy a computer in the UK and have all my data overnighted to me on a portable drive and then build myself a working development environment on a hotel Internet connection is really ugly, but feasible if it comes to that.