How\u2019s that? I had problems sleeping \u2013 must be perpetual paranoia from Baby Brawling \u2013 so I woke up early to start the OS installation first then try going back to sleep. When I got to\u00a0 the Options page to specify which drive to install the new OS followed by a reformat, I \u2013 in all my sleepiness \u2013 chose one of my data<\/em> drives instead of the (correct) program drive.<\/p>\n It took me a couple of seconds after clicking the \u2018reformat\u2019 button to realize that I\u2019d chosen the wrong drive.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what happens when you\u2019re 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\u2026 conducive environment to make R<\/span><\/strong>eally D<\/span><\/strong>umb M<\/span><\/strong>istakes.<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t cancel the reformatting that was already in progress, so I punched the power \u2018reset\u2019 button on the casing instead, then rebooted to see if anything was recoverable.<\/p>\n Thing is, the format did exactly what it was told to do when I got to Windows Explorer<\/em> again \u2013 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<\/a>\u2026Arrrggggghhhh!!!!!<\/p>\n Fortunately, as those of us who\u2019re familiar with computing are aware, formatting doesn\u2019t erase or destroy data. All it does is tell the OS that storage space (that was previously occupied by data) is now \u2018available\u2019. Until you actually put new data onto the \u2018available\u2019 space, all your old data are still there \u2013 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).<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 the utility is busily doing its thing at home while I\u2019m at work.<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n 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<\/a>\u2026!! Arrrgggghh\u2026 I don\u2019t want to have to replay all 50 levels again LOL.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n![\"blog-mistake\"](\"https:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/blogmistake.gif\" "\\"blog-mistake\\"")
<\/p>\n