R.D.Ms.

My desktop PC had been acting real funny over the last couple of days. It has the 64 bit version of Vista Ultimate on it, and when I was first installing it on the PC in January this year, it took a bit of trouble finding all the necessary 64 bit drivers and programs.

In any case, I decided to revert back to the 32 bit OS yesterday.

And here’s the advisory: do not do OS refreshes at 3 am in the morning.

How’s that? I had problems sleeping – must be perpetual paranoia from Baby Brawling – so I woke up early to start the OS installation first then try going back to sleep. When I got to  the Options page to specify which drive to install the new OS followed by a reformat, I – in all my sleepiness – chose one of my data drives instead of the (correct) program drive.

It took me a couple of seconds after clicking the ‘reformat’ button to realize that I’d chosen the wrong drive.

That’s what happens when you’re experiencing sleep deprivation + and have four active hard drives and a fifth portable drive connected to the PC at all times. All the drive letters and labels… conducive environment to make Really Dumb Mistakes.

I couldn’t cancel the reformatting that was already in progress, so I punched the power ‘reset’ button on the casing instead, then rebooted to see if anything was recoverable.

Thing is, the format did exactly what it was told to do when I got to Windows Explorer again – everything was gone on the data drive. All my classical music MP3 purchases, photos, my documents, my 14+ years of emails in Outlook, my save game folder from World in Conflict, my current game campaign state from Plants vs Zombies…Arrrggggghhhh!!!!!

Fortunately, as those of us who’re familiar with computing are aware, formatting doesn’t erase or destroy data. All it does is tell the OS that storage space (that was previously occupied by data) is now ‘available’. Until you actually put new data onto the ‘available’ space, all your old data are still there – just relatively inaccessible unless you make use of data recovery utility programs (or pay a lot of money to data recovery experts and get them to do it for you).

So it was utility programs. For the next couple of hours till it was time to go to work, I had to get to reconstructing the hard drive. No clue if I managed to recover everything though – the utility is busily doing its thing at home while I’m at work.

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My emails I last backed up a month ago, ditto for the MP3s, photos; document files about 4 months back. But my save game from Plants vs Zombies…!! Arrrgggghh… I don’t want to have to replay all 50 levels again LOL.