Absolute Dumbest thing I've ever Done.

[madphilb]

sigh

I got my new HD (and 80 Gig) and decided to put it in tonight. I was running a 4 GB (the original drive with this machine) and a 10 GB that I started using for software and stuff. I un-installed the software I installed on the 10 GB, copied all the files over to the original drive, and powered down the system.

Swapped the drives around, pulled the 10 GB, moved the 4GB there (as a Slave to my DVD/CD-ROM) and put the 80GB in it's final resting place, the main interal HD bay.

Powered up the system, put in the restore disk for my machine, and let it go to town on C: Drive.

When it gave me a format size of 4GB I was a bit worried, but figured I might have to re-FDisk the big drive and do a restore without a format.

Here's where it get's messy. You see, I seem to remember reading that the HD was already formated for Windows.. how wrong I was, must have been another drive I had been looking at.

I wiped out EVERYTHING on my old HD.... no real backup.


Well, I wanted to do a clean install, I got it.


In the end I got the system to boot to my old drive with my newly restored system, installed the software from Western Digital and setup the big drive, then put a system on the disk and copied the CABS directory over into a directory on the new C Drive, booted and did a new install of Win98se without all the extra trash eMachines had installed originally.

The down side is that I'm going to have to re-install everything, I've lost all my bookmarks, and a bunch of files I never backed up on CD.... I really should have done things differently, but what are you going to do, eh?


BTW, if anyone knows a good, fast, easy-to-use (yet control-freak friendly) ZIP program, let me know about it, I don't have any way of unziping things right now, and I don't really want to install WinZIP (never cared for it).

[LorentzForce]

Yep, happens a lot of times to people not used to changing hard drives and backing things up everyday. It's not your fault really, it happens to everyone like human nature. I suppose that is why people in professional backup business do backup runs once in a while to experience how to back their systems up and change over so they get a feel for it.

Hey, think of it as colonising the new land, after leaving the previously old place where you could have stayed but were limited. Now you have space to burn... well, enough to burn for a while.

And for compression on Windows I use WinRAR myself.

[Master Kenzo]

I did the same kinda thing a couple weeks ago. Was going to install Windows so I could play Natural Selection (I had Linux previously) on the extra unpartitioned 30GB of space on my 120GB hard drive. So I went into FDISK (big mistake) and viewed the partition table...which said Non-DOS 1936 MB ... which I thought was kinda wierd...but I decided to go ahead anyway. When it formatted to 106GB...I was kinda worried. Tried booting up into Linux and it died. Lost everything.

[ThaKladd]

I remember a looong time ago when I had a 80 mb hard drive wit a lot of games. when I formatted it, I lost a lot of games because I didn't have a backup... but guess what I did... I used the "unformat" command in dos, at it gave back to me a messy hard drive with files from, I think, 5 formations back... nothing worked, but it was a fun experience..

anyway, I have lost some files before because I switched hard drive or had to format because something went wrong with windows... Now I have a solution... a 160 GB external hard drive where I copy everything once in a while *big backup disk...*

[glitch1501]

if you want a good zip program, i like power archiver, its really easy to use too

[shooraijin]

If you don't mind command-line, the infoZip package is free, fast, portable and 100% compatible. It runs on most OSes, including Win32, Macintosh classic and OS X, and most Unices.

[madphilb]

Thanks for the ZIP suggestions.... I'll have to check WinRAR and see if it handles ZIP files as well as RAR (be nice to have a file that does both)... was using the ZIP functions of PowerDesk (formerly of OnTrack, now it's VCom or something, however they seem to have changed what is in the free version now and it's lost some of it's functionality).

I guess what makes me fell really bad about wasting the old HD is that.... welll.. I should know better, I'm the one everyone comes to for those "just can't get it to work" things.... I made a stupid assumption that I should have checked better... but no use crying over it (yet).

The really bad thing is I don't know how much of the un-replacable stuff I have burned to CD (from when I got my CR/RW drive)..... so I may have lost things like the Raytracing files from POVRay that I made... the only copies of my work may be the old ones over on my old Earthlink account on the web.

Off to find a ZIP program so I can get my sound working, then to check a CD or two and see what I can restore of my old data (much of what I had can be re-installed, and some of it I'll just have to work up to again as far as saved games and whatnot).

See you guys this afternoon after I'm back from Shrek2

[andyroo]

I've used UltimateZip for a while now.

[The Grammarian]

I'd suggest WinRAR. It still lets you work with ZIP files, but a lot of newer stuff uses .rar files that only WinRAR covers. I forget where you go to find WinRAR, but it is free for download, and you can just ignore the occasional requests for you to register the software.

[madphilb]

Actually I found my old install for PowerDesk 4 (one of the few things that I did save to CD..... and it's one I could have lived without)..... got InfoZIP as well, but I like the hook into the right-click menu that PowerDesk adds for handling ZIP files.

From what I'm seeing, unless I got another CD-R around with files from "MyDocuments" on it, I've lost a bunch of stuff, including all my POVRay data files (there goes all the work I put into those renders).... as well as my resume, cheat sheet, etc... I know I can piece some of the data together from other places, but this is worst than when I move.... I'll be finding things I'm missing for years.

Lord knows I'll never do that again.... always check a drive before assuming it's formated and ready to go. (and don't trust automated restoration CDs).