Brains working towards machine consciousness

First of all, Hi to those of you who have used Friend Connect over there on the right.  Lovely to see you Ross, pleased to meet you David, and thanks Karsten (you were on my 'guess' list, it has to be said!).
On New Years Eve, we had a power switch trip here in the home of Godson (in case anyone wonders why I refer to him as Godson, it is because his Mum is cautious about 1yr olds having a web presence, which seems fair).  I lost a chunk of work on my CMALT portfolio, which was doubly irritating because I had already lost it once due to writing it online and there being a network glitch.  Still, I should know better, and I still got it written.
Today, I was tidying things up on my computer.  Defragging drives, discovering I had a 114GB partition which was in hiding, and so I was recovering that - you know, day to day chores which you never get round to on a day to day basis.  When the power went out (and yes, I know that isn't grammatical).  So, when it came back, I was, naturally overjoyed to see that my computer couldn't find ntldr.
Fortunately, with a disturbing degree of ease, I found my old Knoppix no-install cd that I bought a copy of PC Wrold or similar to get my hands on about a decade ago.  Boot from that, fiddle with fdisk for a while (discover interesting new letters to put on the end of /dev/hd which I hadn't encountered before - used to be 'a' in my day) and voila, machine is willing to boot into windows.
Wait for about an hour while it checks a couple of the partititions for errors, and fixes them.  This did make me think of a good answer to those people who say there is no point in partitioning disks these days.  If I had those partitions chopped up even smaller, they would take less time to fix, and there would not be much risk of lots of them being accessed at the same time.  I might do that... wonder where I put partition magic...