As I sit here typing this on my laptop, my desktop’s hard drive is being reformatted in the other room. It’s a little remarkable, but this is the first time I’ve reformatted a hard drive. I’ve probably had 10 computers in my life, but I’ve never had to reformat a drive before. In all cases, either the drive has died, or I’ve passed it on to family members who wanted it ready-to-go, not fresh and reformatted.
As is so often the case, after two years, my desktop environment was getting dodgy. The registry was kinda corrupt, I couldn’t uninstall programs, and the number of bizarre errors was increasing. I’m sure there were smaller scale fixes I could have undertaken, but I’ve decided to go whole hog. Go big or go home, as they say.
I backed up to my external hard drive, and wrote critical files to a couple CDs (a backup to my backup) and am now hoping for the best. 59% and counting. Tonight, when you say your prayers, pray for my data.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Amen to this post AND your data. I’ve had to do the HDS (Hard Drive Shuffle) a few times since 1995.
I begrudgingly gave away my first self-purchased computer recently, a DX-2 50 mhZ , 280M HD with a smoking 16M of RAM. I remember paying $300 bucks for an extra 8M of RAM in the mid ’90s, WTF?
Ah, the memories of backing stuff up to floppies. I had a scheme in ’96 to take all of the floppies from computer magazines that didn’t sell while I was working at Barnes & Noble as a magazine dept. plebe and sell them for .10 each.
Needless to say, that Great Plan went absolutely nowheres, but I had a shitload of floppy disks, let me tell you. Still have some of the, as a matter of fact.
I’m looking at an install disk from CompuServe (an H&R Block Company) WinCIM Ver. 2.0.1 and a floppy of Spry Mosaic Direct. That disk has a Customer Support number on the disk, a little time traveller from the past: 206-515-2995
I’ll have to try that number in the morning, see who’s there.
(sigh)
Never reformatted a hard drive? That’s crazy talk… I let my sales people out of my site for 15 minutes and they’ve managed to defeat 16 layers of protection and install the most tenacious spyware known to mankind, corrupt the registry completely, and “lose” a dozen system DLLs.
I have to reformat a hard drive about once a month, and I only have 18 machines at the office….
On my own end of things, I tend to move to different operating systems on a whim, so that’s my own fault. When I backup, I copy everything to my fileserver, and typically miss one or two important items.
Reformatting hard drives is fun, particularly when you’re installing Linux on the other partition.
Of course, my problem is that I never put all the data back onto the hard drive from those CDs I burned prior. Now, I have a few generations of CDs with nearly random data from different time periods, some of which conflicts, none of which is probably necessary, and all of which I’m afraid to just chuck.
Now I remember why I switched to the Mac. . . Thanks!
I prayed, and Cthulhu says that you are hosed. He also said something about destroying your soul along with the data.
I remember when I used to have to format harddrives. Hasn’t happened since I’ve switched to a good, free operating system 🙂
It’s always a good idea to format Windows machines every few years.
I usually back everything up to my second drive, make a list of software to reinstall, and then do a quick format. The whole process usually takes about an hour and a half, while watching a movie in the background.
I just throw them out.
Data? Pah.