WinXP installation woes

[a.Bird]

I generally shy away from creating threads but I need to rant. Tonight, what would have been a quick format and clean install of Windows XP Pro SP2 on my primary drive turned into hours of frustrating trouble shooting, painful caution, data recovery and a convoluted transfer of files across separate hard drives.

My configuration has, for the last two years, been a single partition, 80GB hdd for OS, programs and documents, and a single partition, 250GB hdd for music, videos, archive files and adobe scratch files (both drives PATA). Well...

I backed up my documents onto my 250GB storage, including bookmarks, game saves, personal settings, etc. After restarting and booting from my XP CD, I select the 80GB with the old OS installation to be reformatted and I delete its partition. I don't know if I accidentally pressed a button but suddenly my storage drive was being reformatted! *forehead drops to keyboard*

This 250GB worth of storage contains every important piece of data under the sun that I have stowed away for almost a decade. I mean I have birthday photos I scanned with the first Lexmark scanner I got back in the mid 90's. So I karate press the reset button and boot into Windows from my main drive which I originally wanted to format and use this program called GetDataBack NTFS.

I recovered all 123GB of data that I had saved on my storage drive and, as I am typing this, am slowly copying the last half of it to a second 80GB hdd that I had laying around. All seems well now, but a simple OS reinstall is going to take a little longer than I had planned on.

Have any of you gone through this sudden trauma? Experienced that feverish heat that rips down your spine when you think you've made an irreversible mistake?

[Omega]

not a user error, but I had a 60gb data drive that blew a transistor or something and windows didn't recognize it anymore. Used GetDataBack NTFS and I, well, got my data back. =p Great proggie, that.

[Airbozo]

Yes, I have done the exact same thing. I swear something took over my hand and _forced_ me to select the wrong drive since I knew it was the wrong one as I was moving toward it and clicked...

Now whenever I do any sort of OS install or disk format, I physically detach all other drives. I have also done this on an sgi system using their version of fdisk (fx is what sgi uses), and it was unrecoverable. Good thing I was also in charge of backups as I was able to recover the data...

[Drum Thumper]

The last time I had any issues with XP was the night of the expansion pack release for Warcrack...err craft. What should have been a simple 45 minute installation (and program downgrade--I sometimes wonder if Blizzard isn't truly owned by Microsoft lol) turned into a 5 hour marathon. Hell of a time to have a hard drive decide to go belly up.

But even that wasn't a true XP issue--more along the lines of a hard drive issue.

[Luke122]

How about this one?

"format c: /q /s /y" enter

"wow.. there's lots of stuff on this floppy.. system32?"

*panic*ctrl+c, ctrl+break, ctrl-alt-del, RESET*panic*

That was a rough day.

[Airbozo]

Off Topic linux/unix woes;

# rm -r / test


Ruins your day...

[NightrainSrt4]

Off Topic linux/unix woes;

# rm -r / test


Ruins your day...

I take it you were logged in as a superuser. All I can say is ouch.

Edit: I was going to try this out on the schools system. Only a reg user. Asked if I wanted to override the directory permissions. I just said no as I don't know how well the college has this system set up. Not all the admins here are too great. I'd be no better than them, so I can't complain but I'm glad I didn't hit y + enter as with my luck they would have crap security set up, or it just would have let me as they just assume no one would do that, and the root directory would be wiped. It'd be all my fault lmao. I really don't need to be hunted and sacrificed to the unix gods right now.

[XcOM]

the best one, i had made my first unattended win XP install disk, and forgot to tell it to let me decide where to install to, i left my digie cam pluged in with a 4gb memory card.

i thought this format is fast, then after setup, oh why do i only have 1gb space free?


HOLY CRAP, i managed to install XP onto my digital camara!

[Crazy Buddhist]

HOLY CRAP, i managed to install XP onto my digital camara!

HAHAHHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHA!!!!!

[billygoat333]

classic.

I bricked a hard drive that i just barely bought trying to lock it for use in a game system... and now i cant unlock it. sucks, 250 gb worth of space that cant be used unless i pay someone like $20 to break the security for me. oh well.