[digitalhigh]

So...wow. Uh, where to begin?

Okay. I was attempting to do an XBMC live installation on an iPod I had sitting around...wanted to see if I could boot from it for poops and grins.

Made me a live CD.

Booted it in my main desktop PC.

Selected option 0. (USB INSTALLATION)

(Oh, and I also made damned sure to unplug my two external HDD's that held all my movies)

The computer thought, thought some more, and then asked me which drive I wanted to choose. I looked at the file size, and I'm almost *positive* that the size shown was 2xxx mb. Regardless, it was the only drive shown.

So, I inputted the drive number that coincided with the drive.

The screen began to output "deleting partitions"..."creating partitions"

It was at about this point where I began to hear the HARD DRIVE chattering furiously over the noise of my CD-ROM.

It took me a second to realize what the hell was happening...about three seconds into the "formatting drive" dialogue.

I powered off my PC. Powered it on. Shook my head sadly as I realized I just screwed my main HDD in a major way.


What does this teach us?

I think the USB installer could use a FEW more dummy checks...

Maybe put in something to determine that the drive IS in fact a USB drive, and add a BIG WARNING if something other than USB is used.

Too...howabout changing the filesize calculator to Gigabytes? I know the math isn't hard, but this install is most likely going to be put on flash drives > than one Gig, so I don't see what it would hurt.

I'm not blaming you guys. I take full responsibility for not reading the screen closer. I was in a rush, and I am now suffering the consequences of it.

But, perhaps to save others the cataclysmic fuxup that is re-partitioning AND formatting a hard drive...well, maybe add a few more checks? Please?

And, on that note...every source file for everything I've ever done is now locked in a hard drive who's fate I'm still trying to determine. How ironic that the only other PC with a SATA drive is the HTPC I just built, and was trying to get a LIVE build working for...

[FoxMcCloud]

For me, my hardrive showed up as being "1: sda (200000 mb)" whereas my USB showed up as "2: sdb (2000 mb) removable"

I almost made the mistake like because the usb stick wasnt in properly so i thought my hdd was the usb, until i noticed it was 198gb too big lol.

What i think would be better is perhaps another warning and confirmation screen after choosing a drive, just to give you another chance to triple check the drive. This is the first program ive seen i think that just formats something on a single "yeah its that drive" action.

[digitalhigh]

Or even an error check where it goes "OOPS! This drive doesn't seem to be removable. Do you wish to continue?"

On the bright side...I think most of my data is recoverable. The first part of the HDD was a HP recovery partition, so that was the first thing to go when the formatting started. Whew.

Unfortunately, I went to sleep last night and woke up and the damned computer is off...IDK what happened, but now I've gotta start scanning from the beginning again...

[CademiaX]

well, its a quick format, easy to recover

[digitalhigh]

well, its a quick format, easy to recover

Not really. The File Allocation Table was totally overwritten. After three days of trying to recover, I just formatted everything...

[watzen]

hope you didn't have any important photos/videos on it. Because if you have, you can still recover them even if the FAT is totally overwritten.

[digitalhigh]

hope you didn't have any important photos/videos on it. Because if you have, you can still recover them even if the FAT is totally overwritten.

It was a mess. The drive was originally formatted into two different partition, one main, and one backup. The autoformat deleted both partitions and then repartitioned the drive into one big part.

No autorecover software would find anything valid as it would only pick up the new partition data. And doing a RAW scan for headers only resulted in garbage files.

So I thought...deleting the partitions and just letting it try to scan the drive might work. It recovered filenames, but I'm thinking that because the stuff was so fragged (I'm terrible at defragmenting...never do it) It was only hitting the name info and not all of the data.

Like I said, after three days of searching, trying, reading, and hoping to god somebody would post some useful info here...I gave up and reinstalled. Now the drive has 24.3 out of 186gb free.

I guess...nothing MAJOR was lost. My videos/music/tv shows are all backed up onto external drives which I upgrade once a year or so. The only thing I lost that I really would have liked to keep was the source code for a skin I'd been writing for winamp...and that is most definitely toast by now.

I don't really care...I'm such a packrat with my files it isn't even funny. I had copies of Kazaa from before it sucked still sitting in my appz folder...

[Pvt_Ryan]

lol.. I can beat that. I was working on an automated floppy that would delete and repartition my PCs using a VM. I turned off the computer (forgetting to remove said floppy) and my dad switched on his PC and wondered why all he had was a black screen as the disk proceeded to format everything.. To say I was unpopular would be an understatement.

[Fire69]

And now for the important question!
Did you get it running on your iPod?

[digitalhigh]

And now for the important question!
Did you get it running on your iPod?

I didn't ever get to the point of trying to install it. I realized what was really being formatted, freaked out, and then proceeded to spend the next several days trying to fix it.

Theoretically, it should work. If it's any of the iPods with flash storage, then it should still be possible.