Who knew that my last post on an encrypted backup drive would be so timely.  Last night while testing a piece of software something went horribly awry.  One moment I was in my Windows partition working away and the next my laptop rebooted and informed me there was not bootable OS on my hard drive.  PANIC!!!  I had an Ubuntu Server Alternate CD on me so I popped that in and assessed the damage.  It was not good.  What used to be my NTFS partition for my Windows XP install was shown as an unknown and my boot partition was shown as free space.  I honestly have no idea what happened.  The good news is that I was able to use the Ubuntu CD recovery mode to validate that my encrypted LVM partitions were ok.  Now I just have to figure out how to get everything pointing and booting it again.  Most importantly though all my critical business information was on my 1 Gig CF card in my PC Card slot encrypted using TrueCrypt.  So no real data loss just time and application install loss.  So as of right now I am typing from my newly installed XP install setup the the way I like it and not how Dell likes it.  Which means that it boots in less than 45 seconds and my wireless works at boot instead of 15 minutes later like it did in the default install.  I will keep a running update as I dig through the rubble of my HD trying to figure out what happened.