The Gateway would not recover from its system recovery partition last night. There was error after error after error trying to recover from it, and when it finally did finish, the system wouldn’t boot. Boo. Hiss.

This morning, I repacked the Gateway into its cardboard crypt, and took it back to Best Buy. I’d researched who in town had it in stock — I was told we got the last one at the store we bought it from — and took it to a store quite a bit farther away.

The customer service gal was good, until she started questioning why we brought it to her store. I explained that she was the closest one in stock according to the Best Buy website. She tells me that the place I bought it from really did have more, and I got the sense that she was about to tell me to go there to do this return. To her credit, she figured out how to do the return, and started processing it. While doing that, one of the Geek Squad geeks came out and started giving me the twenty questions game of what was wrong with it, what was I doing to know it failed, did I try different media, etc., etc. The look on his face told me he didn’t believe that it wouldn’t verify DVDs it had written, but he didn’t push it.

Thirty minutes after I entered, expecting a fight, I had a new Gateway, and they had a happier customer on their hands. So here I sit, making my first run at a recovery DVD for the machine — first thing I’ve done after getting the network setup. We’ll see if this one verifies!