I’m no man of backups. I rely on hope, manufacturer quality assurances and my own strong will to keep things from breaking down. This usually works quite well but unfortunately Windows XP slipped from my mind claw tonight and finally managed to damage its own boot record.
I must confess that it was not completely out of the blue. Windows tried to warn me yesterday and the day before as my computer recovered from serious error after serious error.
Tonight tough, it somehow escaped my superhuman powers that can shape technology in any form and some unfortunate bits were allocated in a spot were they don’t belong. After I tried to reboot to my Windows partition it would only respond with a pathetic beep and after a few more reboots I accepted defeat and went to fetch the installation disk.
Twenty minutes later my Windows partition is reformatted and Windows has been re-installed. I cannot get into FreeBSD anymore because the master boot record has been overwritten as a result. And I lost a bunch of pretty important stuff that cannot easily be recreated (beats, raw music files and recordings). I also learned a valuable lesson about making backups though.
Fortunately there is also a lot of stuff that is not gone. This is more due to the spreading of risk (across multiple harddisks) than to my preservation skills. Now I’m waiting for the essential Windows updates to finish and then I’m gonna try re-activating the Thriple Head 2Go. At least I won’t loose any data this time if it screws up.