I have a 250GB USB hard drive on which I ‘back up’ different types of media that I regularly use with my PC; MP3s, images of magazine cover disks, images of game disks, images of all the software I’ve ever bought. And, of course, all the license keys and serial numbers. That way, I can archive (throw away) the CDs and their cases, and use virtual drive software to mount the images. I don’t have to keep dozens of otherwise useless software boxes lying around, I don’t have to keep changing CDs to play games, and everything is there at my fingertips.

Last night I discovered Windows XP will happily install onto a USB hard drive.

Without warning.

Well, I claim “without warning”, but I think I really mean “the warning was there, but I knew what I was doing so I ignored it”. Yes, that’s what I mean.

After having finally transferred all my stuff to my new PC, it was time to rebuild my old one and give it to Charlie, as promised. But a series of events conspired against me–including my failure to disconnect the external drive–and the Windows XP installer didn’t recognise the RAID array; so it decided to install on said USB device instead.

The drive was nearly full, and I lost it all.

I suppose it buys me some time before I have to decide what to do when the drive runs out of space.