So here’s me totally in line for a top 150 finish and a brand new purple Doom cover.
One day before the event finishes I boot up Steam in preparation for another push in the Hulk event and the system freezes up with 100% CPU usage while loading Steam, before becoming responsive again. Not wanting to risk my savegame sync with Steam cloud going nuts, I decide to reboot first and start clean.
← My face when the system BSODs during boot
← My face when it enters ‘startup repair’ mode and reports “C:$Secure is corrupted” *
Doom now being the least of my concerns, I’m faced with total loss of the data I hadn’t backed up yet (don’tcha know; I had a backup scheduled the next day after the system failed…) and the potential of hardware failure meaning further expenditures for replacement. So, I get stuck in repair mode for 2 days straight.
After waiting that long, I finally get fed up with Microsoft’s repair tool doing nothing but sitting there and spinning in the mud. I pop in a Linux DVD and live boot from it.
← My face when Linux mounts all my NTFS partitions fine.
← My face when it turns out all my data is 100% ok and the SMART stats on the drive report all green.
…
← My face when realization sinks in that Microsoft has just trolled me out of Doom’s purple by spending over 2 days attempting to repair problems Linux can happily skip over… on a file system designed by Microsoft in the first place…
TINY - <> - KITTY !!!
Oh well; time to move everything of value to my NAS and then format and reinstall…
…
Think it’d help to kindly ask D3P to take pity and grant me a purple Doom cover?
Nah… didn’t think so either. 
*) $Secure is a system-level hidden folder that’s part of the NTFS file system itself. Getting it corrupted means your file system integrity is pretty much toast.
