my data, it is gone
I did a stupid thing this weekend. Scratch that. I did a Stupid Thing this weekend. Easily one of the stupidest things I have done in a while.
Since I am officially a graduate student, I have access to Windows Vista Business Edition for free via the MSDN Academic Alliance. (No, installing Vista was not the stupid thin, stop cringing.) I had tried to install it last week, only to get a blue screen upon booting from the CD. I found out Saturday that the installer can't handle more than 3GB of RAM, so I had to remove my excess RAM during installation. No problem.
I wanted to do a clean install, not an upgrade. I wanted a fresh start. I have two hard drives: an 80 gb for Windows and program installations and a 300 GB for all my documents, music, pictures, and recorded TV shows (since my PC is also my DVR using Media Center). I got to the window during the installation in which I can delete and/or format hard drive partitions. I recalled that my Dell computer came with a back up partition and a boot partition so I wanted to formate the third. I should have looked more carefully before clicking format. As soon as the format finished I looked at the size of the disk I had just formatted. 280-something GB. The one that I did *not* format was 60-something GB.
Crap.
So, for the second time in my life, all my documents, music, pictures, and basically all my stored data is gone into nothingness. But instead of this overall feeling of dread that I had when I fried my laptop hard drive three years ago, I am oddly not that upset. I mean, I don't think I had any documents that were that important. Most of my music is recoverable from CDs I own or from friends' music libraries. So I wasn't that upset until I realized I'd lost all my photos as well.
Photos. I spend so much time snapping pictures on trips. Gone. thankfully, most all of the photos I really care about are backed up in various places. My Italy and San Francisco photos are all on flickr. My Disney photos are backed up on my sister's computer. I was afeared I had lost all my Guatemala and Belize photos, but thankfully they're on an SD card that I hadn't yet erased. I believe wyvern_x has a copy of all my Washington DC/Virginia photos (and if you could confirm below, I'd appreciate it). My Grand Canyon photos and trips prior to March of 2005 were all taken by a friend, so I can get those from him. So, really, I can recover pretty much all of my important photos. Which is all I really care about.
So, after an initial scare, I'm breathing easier. If anyone knows how I can do a mass download of photos from flickr, I'd certainly love to hear it (I would really rather not pay for several CDs of my own photos).
I shall post later about Vista once I've had more time to play with it, but for now suffice it to say that I love it. Obviously, it's very pretty. Which is really worth more than people give it credit. Having a beautiful interface on a Windows machine is long overdue. But besides that, I'm finding little features here and there that I love. The sidebar kinda sucks, but that was quickly replaced with Google's superior sidebar anyway. Since I use Media Center (piped through the Xbox 360) as my DVR, I upgraded to Ultimate. The fact that I could upgrade from Business to Ultimate using the same DVD was pretty awesome in and of itself.
Phae, please stop cringing and making squeaks of discontent, I can hear you from here.
Since I am officially a graduate student, I have access to Windows Vista Business Edition for free via the MSDN Academic Alliance. (No, installing Vista was not the stupid thin, stop cringing.) I had tried to install it last week, only to get a blue screen upon booting from the CD. I found out Saturday that the installer can't handle more than 3GB of RAM, so I had to remove my excess RAM during installation. No problem.
I wanted to do a clean install, not an upgrade. I wanted a fresh start. I have two hard drives: an 80 gb for Windows and program installations and a 300 GB for all my documents, music, pictures, and recorded TV shows (since my PC is also my DVR using Media Center). I got to the window during the installation in which I can delete and/or format hard drive partitions. I recalled that my Dell computer came with a back up partition and a boot partition so I wanted to formate the third. I should have looked more carefully before clicking format. As soon as the format finished I looked at the size of the disk I had just formatted. 280-something GB. The one that I did *not* format was 60-something GB.
Crap.
So, for the second time in my life, all my documents, music, pictures, and basically all my stored data is gone into nothingness. But instead of this overall feeling of dread that I had when I fried my laptop hard drive three years ago, I am oddly not that upset. I mean, I don't think I had any documents that were that important. Most of my music is recoverable from CDs I own or from friends' music libraries. So I wasn't that upset until I realized I'd lost all my photos as well.
Photos. I spend so much time snapping pictures on trips. Gone. thankfully, most all of the photos I really care about are backed up in various places. My Italy and San Francisco photos are all on flickr. My Disney photos are backed up on my sister's computer. I was afeared I had lost all my Guatemala and Belize photos, but thankfully they're on an SD card that I hadn't yet erased. I believe wyvern_x has a copy of all my Washington DC/Virginia photos (and if you could confirm below, I'd appreciate it). My Grand Canyon photos and trips prior to March of 2005 were all taken by a friend, so I can get those from him. So, really, I can recover pretty much all of my important photos. Which is all I really care about.
So, after an initial scare, I'm breathing easier. If anyone knows how I can do a mass download of photos from flickr, I'd certainly love to hear it (I would really rather not pay for several CDs of my own photos).
I shall post later about Vista once I've had more time to play with it, but for now suffice it to say that I love it. Obviously, it's very pretty. Which is really worth more than people give it credit. Having a beautiful interface on a Windows machine is long overdue. But besides that, I'm finding little features here and there that I love. The sidebar kinda sucks, but that was quickly replaced with Google's superior sidebar anyway. Since I use Media Center (piped through the Xbox 360) as my DVR, I upgraded to Ultimate. The fact that I could upgrade from Business to Ultimate using the same DVD was pretty awesome in and of itself.
Phae, please stop cringing and making squeaks of discontent, I can hear you from here.