Bloody computers

[Elbonio]

ok so i buy two new 200GB HD's for stratlan

Ok so i need to fdisk and format them

"hmm need a boot disk of some sort" i say to myself "no floppy drive so i'll have to boot off a cd... where's one of my windows xp cd's?"

So i look round trying to find the windows CD to boot off, cant find it but instead i find a win2k instllation disk. That'll do.

So i tell it to create a partition and format it NTFS styyleee whilst i go and watch the A-team (the one where they hypnotise BA to get him on the plane - a classic)


and i come back to find it starting to install win2k

so i just reset my pc

only to find that it's not just formatted 1 drive

it's formatted *all* my drives

i had a lot of stuff on my main drive that i wanted/NEEDED to keep


now it's gone.


FFS



WHY did it format all 3? why?

[Cheez]

It only does what you tell it to. Pay more attention.

Reminds me of an old saying, "computers follow your instructions, not your intentions."

[Elbonio]

well i told it to format one drive, it took the initiative and formatted them all


i knew something was up when after i watched the first episode of the a-team i came back and it was nearly finished formatting my 2nd new drive. I was quite pelased at the time, i thought "oh that's clever - how did it know!"


little did i know that it was on a psychotic formatting rampage

[Freelance]

don't touch your original disk, and install your OS onto one of the new ones. you can do fairly good data recovery usually if the drive is untouched

[Elbonio]

Yeah i plan to


i was just too tired and too annoyed to do anything last night



never leave a computer unattended whilst it's formatting drives


:rolleyes:

[Bluey]

Or disconnect one's you don't want formatted.

Prevents the computer from "taking the initiative"

[Elbonio]

i did think about doing that but then i couldnt be bothered as i'd already put the case back on



ahh the consequences of laziness eh?

[RocketKnight]

Yeah I'm paranoid something like that will happen to me when I'm formatting so I always unplug drives I want to keep. Better safe than sorry and all that.

It's a real problem when you're on a budget and you don't have a real way of backing up all your stuff. For example, I don't have any way of backing up my 600Gb of data right now. If anything dies I'll be crying myself to sleep that night.

All I can do is back up the essentials onto DVD with the writer I bought, but its still not really enough IMO. Ah to be rich. :)

[maxrealism]

You know, if you remove the windows CD during the formatting it can't install win2k or infact do anything past finishing formatting.

Dunno why it did all your drives, i've not seen that before.

Why didn't you just boot to ur existing operating system disk and format the disks while in 2k/xp whatever ur using?

[Freelance]

i feel a "DOH!" coming on

[Elbonio]

Originally posted by maxrealism

Dunno why it did all your drives, i've not seen that before.


me either.... until now

Originally posted by maxrealism

Why didn't you just boot to ur existing operating system disk and format the disks while in 2k/xp whatever ur using?

i did but they werent showing up in windows for some odd reason, so i figured i needed to fdisk em anyway


and no i dont have partition magic

[Elbonio]

Originally posted by Freelance
i feel a "DOH!" coming on

too late. that happened last night just after i found out... :rolleyes:

[Mu5icMan]

you can still recover the data from the formatted drive.

I use a program called GetNTFS which finds deleted files and recovers them.

Could take a while though

[KingDaveRa]

A computer will only do something wrong if its a bug.

Most of the time, its 'operator error'.

I.e. you obviously told it to format the drives, but didn't notice.

Dave's lesson for the day: Unplug drives with data on you really want to keep BEFORE formatting. I've nearly always done this after losing files.

Also, why the hell where you trying to format from DOS? What's so wrong with Disk Management? Works perfectly well for me. Anybody who says formatting from DOS/Setup is better is wrong. It makes no difference that I have ever noticed.

Anyway, try this: http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/download.htm

[Hitori]

As KingDaveRa said, you can format new hard drives from disk management (right click on my computer, manage, disk management). When you're formatting something on ntfs, you might as well do a quick format, since it takes about 5 seconds and (afaik) has no problems.

[Cabe]

PICNIC* errors are the WORST















*Problem In Chair, Not In Computer

[Hitori]

oh god, i know that one
im only just sorting out my fileserver's c drive after about 2-3 weeks of it being down

[Elbonio]

ok update



it wasnt formatted. It just didnt have an OS on it (win2k started to install over it, cancelled = no OS).

but it did format both of my new drives (putting 2 partitions on one??)

and i lost my documents etc :rolleyes:

so i wasnt going completely mental.


k thx.

[Elbonio]

Originally posted by KingDaveRa


Also, why the hell where you trying to format from DOS? What's so wrong with Disk Management? Works perfectly well for me. Anybody who says formatting from DOS/Setup is better is wrong. It makes no difference that I have ever noticed.




becuase the drives werent showing up in windows, i assumed this was becuase there was no parition, decided just to fdisk and format regardless

and i have no floppy drive

hence why i used a windows install cd to boot off and create the partitions and format

[KingDaveRa]

For future reference:

Disk management will show disks without partitions, so you can create and format them.

[Storm]

Ur not alone Elbonio, I've done that :rolleyes: ...ever since, I always take the other drives out, just to be on the safe side.