Sometime during the Gentoo install, I must have typed mke2fs /dev/hda1 because I wiped the XP partition and replaced it with an empty ext2 partition.

Oh well, the registry was pretty funky anyway so maybe a reinstall will speed things up. It's a pity moving your Documents and Settings dir to a different partition is so difficult in Windows, or it would be a much less of an oops.

I'm almost tempted to not bother - I'm pretty certain I can replace every program I routinely use on Windows with a Linux version, apart from the games (which, ironically, all survived the ooops because they're on a different drive). Wine and Cedega are almost there, but seem to fail on the games I like to play (had a stab with Auto Assault earlier with no luck). Or maybe VMware could do the job - I'm installing FC5 on the freeware Windows version on the laptop at the moment, just to see what it's like.