that just when you’ve reformatted your hard drive using the 18-gig external you borrowed for a day or two so you decide to reinstall everything just for good computer hygiene (and to combat some pernicious problems) that your CD-ROM decides to crap out on you? Not 10 minutes earlier I’d used the self-same CD-ROM drive to install the OS on the external so that I could calmly and rationally proceed… but it never mounted another disk. Well, it mounted one disk – that containing the formatting software installer. Figures. Murphy squared.