So I didn’t really have time to explain all this yesterday, but when the guy came over to sell me the hard drive, it turned out he had two of ‘em — the one I’d spoken to him about was a 40-gig but he also had an 80-gigger for twenty bucks more.  I took that one.  And after he took off, he called me back and said "oh by the way, that drive is completely full of movies and stuff… if you want ‘em, you should copy them off before you format the drive." I was all… uh, okay!  Thanks dude!

So when I plugged the drive in, I was in for a real surprise.  It didn’t just have movies on it, but fuckin’ everything.  It was somebody’s primary hard drive, with Windows XP, all the settings, a whole buttload of programs (a lot of them warez versions), tons of personal photos in the My Pictures folder, tons of MP3s, everything you can imagine!  And yes, movies in AVI and DIVX formats that it looks like he got using Kazaa, the one filesharing program I found.  From the login name it seems like the drive belonged to the brother, or some other family member of the guy who sold it to me.  I guess he’d cloned everything to a bigger drive.  How freaky.  When I first booted up after running the repair routine with my own WinXP disk, there were a bunch of programs set to start automatically upon login, including a couple of chat programs which launched and logged me in under the previous owner’s username.  I logged out immediately and deleted the accounts but… dude!!  Just hard to believe anybody would let all their shit out in the wild like that.  I’m perfectly trustworthy of course, but here I am using someone else’s drive with all their personal settings on it and everything.  It’s like being given the keys to their house or something.

Of course, being a good geek I checked the drive out for viruses, spyware, adware etc.; it came up clean except for some cookies I didn’t want.  There’s a lot of stuff on here I think I want to keep so I may not format the drive after all.  But before I put anything of mine on there I really want to comb through everything and delete all the stuff I don’t want, and change all the settings so it’s MINE and not THEIRS.  I bought a spindle of blank CDs yesterday so I could start dumping the movies down, that’ll give me a lot more room.

It’s just so WEIRD and surreal… I would never EVER do that, sell a drive without wiping it first.  Never.  Ever.  No way, no how.  Uh-uh!!  I don’t see why anybody else would either, but whatever blows yer skirt up.  Thanks for all the movies man!!