I'm brilliant.
Spyware had infected my home machine (Internet Explorer is the devil, everyone should use Firefox!), and after trying to disinfect it as well I could, it was still clogged. So, I decided it was time for a format. Now, I'm a fairly experienced computer user, having built and maintained many machines over the years, and always expect problems when attempting something like this, but this time it was a little more complex.
Windows XP kept locking up midway through installation. After several attempts, I installed Redhat Linux 7.2 to see if it was a hardware problem. It was fine. After spending a whole weekend messing around with it, I finally got WinXP to install by removing everything extraneous from the computer and setting the BIOS to the failsafe defaults. I thought my problems were over, but then I realized that my second hard drive wasn't being recognized. Somehow it's partition table was corrupted. After more hours of frantically trying software after software that promised data recovery, I stumbled upon a little command-line utility that fixed it. Google is your friend.
So, once again, I thought everything was golden. I hadn't lost anything (especially my game development files!)... or had I?
Turns out the Outlook PST archive I saved was a really old one. From 2001. And, I forgot to back up my FTP sites list from WS_FTP. Both were on the partition I formatted. Not the end of the world, but annoying nonetheless.
I still can't figure out why Windows refused to load in the beginning, and why it's fine now, because the hardware configuration is essentially the same. Maybe it has to do with the service packs.
If I could totally switch to Linux I would.
Posted by mix at December 7, 2004 01:36 PM