Computer disasters

Jonny69

Jonny69

Jonny69

Man of Honour
Man of Honour
Joined
3 May 2004
Posts
17,722
Location
Kapitalist Republik of Surrey
Today Windows 98 killed my computer. For years I've been happily bumbling along with XP Home, legit, but missing one critical file: a font I once had back when I used Windows 98. Pan Roman is where the 69 in my sig comes from. I don't know exactly where it came from but I had it when I was a student using dodgy graphics software and it was the perfect match for what I wanted at the time. I made an Adobe Illustrator layout, the black 69 in a white circle, converted it to a Photoshop psd and history was made. Or so I thought.

Several years later and I find myself sitting here in my pants needing the original Illustrator file. I managed to find it on an ancient CD but when I tried to open it I found my critical font was missing. Damn, it must have been on the older version of Illustrator which is long, long gone.

Adobe are kind enough to keep back copies of trial versions so I tried downloading them all but no luck, so I assumed it was part of my rocking Windows 98SE I had as a student. No probs then, I did IT for a bit, I'll just install 98 on the spare partition...

No joy, it's a partitioning thing with XP on the primary partition running on NTFS so I killed the session and went to boot back to XP. NTLDR cannot be found. Oooo that's not good. But that's no problem for me, I've got my system hacked to hell on two partitions so Windows links to my files, emails, desktop etc on the second partition and the system partition is ghosted for quick recovery. Anything can happen to Windows and my files are safe and intact.

Or so I thought. Today it decided to corrupt the ghost image and after a bit of messing about and formatting trying to get it to work I now have to reinstall everything and I mean everything, so that's my smug grin thoroughly wiped off. I think I'm most annoyed that I've lost my internet bookmarks as these were the only bit I didn't have backed up.

What are your computer disasters then?
 
Ouch. Could you not have copied it off the Windows 98 CD without having to install the whole thing? I'm sure at the very least those kind of files are stored in a CAB format so with an appropriate utility you can pull them off... ;)

As for my disasters - well I installed Windows ME once. Never again.

My worst ever is probably when I bought a Thermaltake case. So many sharp edges, ended up bleeding all over my motherboard, which then wouldn't boot.
 
There are a whole lot of should-have-dones. A ghost image should have done the trick and it has done numerous times in the past, but it goes to show you just can't rely on anything.
 
Lucero said:
To be fair, anyone but a complete moron would have just shoved 98 into a VM where at least you can configure the disk and its properties.

So, in short, I've decided, you FAIL. :p ;)
Click to expand...

I actually think only a small demographic even know what a VM is.

I do, but i'd be stuffed if you ever asked me to set one up.
 
Lucero said:
To be fair, anyone but a complete moron would have just shoved 98 into a VM where at least you can configure the disk and its properties.

So, in short, I've decided, you FAIL. :p ;)
Click to expand...
Oh wait, you win so hard.

No, I don't have a VM set up and I doubt my computer would be able to run it because it's over 5 years old and not been upgraded. Besides, I've lost count of the times I've done this and it HAS worked :rolleyes:
 
Dropping a 17" CRT out of a minibus into a puddle, then picking it up and shaking it to see if anything broke loose. Amazingly it still worked, so disaster avoided. :D
 
Pwnt.

And this is why I hate partitions and why I have a 2nd and 3rd drive for movies and documents + backups and even then those drives have external drivers that I MS Synctoy onto every other week :p
 
mrk said:
Pwnt.

And this is why I hate partitions and why I have a 2nd and 3rd drive for movies and documents + backups and even then those drives have external drivers that I MS Synctoy onto every other week :p
Click to expand...

Still managed to delete one of those by accident before.....

And did windows ME...
 
I had a close call a while back when reinstalling XP. I had 2 drives, one for the OS and one for my files. The drives were different sizes (160GB and 320GB). Came to the partition screen on the setup and deleted the partition on the 160GB drive, and installed XP on to that. So far so good, until I boot in to windows and try and access my files on the other drive to install the usual programs, and find the drive isn't showing up. In disk management it was showing up as unpartitioned space, so cleverly the partition set up had managed to remove the data about it (I think it was the partition table or MBR that was deleted?). I'm 100% sure it wasn't me as the drives were different sizes and I made sure I didn't make any changes to the larger drive which I used for storage.

Managed to obtain a data recovery software which fixed the problem so I regained access to all ~150GB of data thankfully (it wasn't backed up either :o)

Lesson learnt: When installing an OS I always physically disconnect every other drive to ensure I won't have the same problem. Takes 2 minutes and I can be certain that I won't have the same problem.
 
Fontastically bad luck there OP.

I tend to use old fonts from an old Corel CD, but they work on XP too so it's easy to fetch one if I come across an old bit of artwork in which I used a non standard font.

I have had no real software messups, apart from trying to install linux on a RAID setup, it managed to install itself on one drive only completely messing up the existing install of Windows.

Hardware wise, I dropped the CMOS battery on the MB when it was still powered on and zapped the networking chip, oh hum, I pleaded ignorance to the manufacturer and got a new one. :o

Oh, and tried to boot my Shuttle off an inverter, it didn't work so tried a cheap generator and the PS went bang, replaced under warranty again. :o
 
Logged into one of out customers (a large stock broker) development OMS database and executed some SQL statements. Left the PC while I went for a smoke and someone decided they wanted to use my box to check something on the production system. I come back and keep playing thinking its the development system..... That wasnt a fun afternoon :(
 
Last time I had to reinstall windows it started formatting the wrong drive and before I could stop it I had lost my entire pron collection, I spent a week or two building it up again, but somethings just arn't there anymore :(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom