(squeeeeeak) Come in friends, come in. Welcome to the Inner Sanctum, er, TNPC's Terror Theater. This week's tale of horror is from a post by James Manka (one of the many MVPs that make the Annoyance Board such a helpful place). Seems James added some additional memory to his computer and Windows 98 suddenly refused to boot.
James wasn't worried because, like many of us, he keeps his C: partition exclusively for holding the operating system so he can reinstall Windows when these little things happen. His data meanwhile was safely tucked away on his D: partition. James figured he'd first restore his Win95 configuration from his Compaq "Quick Restore" CD then re-upgrade to Win98.
Now the story takes a sinister twist. With Win98 he had painlessly changed his D: drive to the FAT32 format to enjoy its space-saving benefits. [Cue lightning flash and scary music.] But the OEM restore disk decided that as long as it was installing Win95 on C: it would go ahead and reformat the D: drive as well, thereby trashing all of James's data. [Shot rings out, scream, fade to black.] The end?
James says the moral of this story is, "Factory install CDs may format more than the unwary are expecting, especially if backtracking from Windows 98 to Windows 95, AND you have partitions that have been converted to FAT32."
Epilogue: Fear not. James may have been caught unaware but he was sharp enough to have a full, current, and uncompressed backup of his D: partition and was able to restore all his data after re- reinstalling Windows 98. Do you know where your backups are? It may be later than you think...
