So yesterday there was a minor emergency in my life. My Laptop died - or rather the OS on my laptop died.

Prior to my mishap with rd, I was playing around in SQL Server Query Analyzer, and ran a funny little query like so:

EXEC xp_cmdshell 'del \\agamemnon\d$\FakeBackupDirectory *.* /F /Q '
GO

That just uses xp_cmdshell (an extended proc that lets sql server have access to the command prompt) to zip out to a share on my local box and delete the files in the share. Nothing big.

Only when I did that, I got a NASTY warning from the OS, telling me that trusted operating system files had been replaced by an unknown source. Would I please put in the WinXP CD so that Windows could fix0r the problem I scratched my head, checked for viruses, satan, etc. and slapped in the CD. Obviously SQL Server decided to overwrite some of my key .dlls when it did this delete operation 'remotely' (i.e. against a share).

That scared the crap out of me, so I started playing around on Virtual Machines for 'spooky' command line operations. (And then blew up one of my Virtual Machines.) At any rate, things were stinky enough with my Host OS that I decided to reboot. Only hal.dll had been corrupted, and the box wouldn't restore.

Luckily I use Acronis True Image, had a decent backup/image of my OS, and all of my data had been backed up just an hour or so before my box refused to boot. I restored from my Acronis image (note to self, don't use an image vectored from an image where both images have heavy compression - recovery took 2 hours (then I had to install everything that I've installed since the image was made 2+ months ago)).

So, today, everything is back up and running. Only I'm playing around with Performance Counters on my host, and the Processor Counter Group simply doesn't exist. *scratches head*