Re: WinXP install ruins two HDs - Help!

"BobV" <rvandy1613@xxxxxxx> wrote in
news:#jDQfIXGHHA.816@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

I guess maybe I'm a little oversensitive at this point. I just can't
figure out how I did what I did, and I've explained things in detail
to the IT guys at work, and they tell me as well they have never heard
anything like it.

I had an oddball thing happen to me. And worst of all, it was while I was
working on the wife's computer, which obviously is WAAAYYY worse than
screwing up my own computer.

Anyway, the PC had 2 physical drives in it, C & D (I don't remember if
they were on the same IDE channel or not). I was going to do a clean
install of XP on it for her. It was only a 15 gig drive for the system
drive and another 15 gig for data. Since it was a smaller drive, I was
ging to use FAT32 instead of NTFS.

I booted from a Win98 boot disk, then (absolutely) typed format c:
(positively), it went along formatting, and when done, I put the XP CD in
and rebooted. When the install started, it said there was a version of XP
on the drive, what do you want to do with it ?

WHAT !?!?!?!?!?

Turns out, something went awry with the previous boot from the Win98 CD,
and the drive letters were swapped. Needless to say, she was p*ssed !!! I
spent the next 6 hours recovering data from the newly formatted drive.

I don't know how it happened, or why, but am ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY SURE
that I typed format c: and not format d:.

So now, whenever an install is done, I make sure that the only HD in the
machine is the main system drive, and nothing else.

Which is a good tip anyway, and recommended here quite often. One HD, KB,
mouse, and display adapter for install, then add devices after eveything
works up to that point.

Regards,

DanS




.

Relevant Pages

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