Originally posted here, 04/11/06

Anyway, in other news, my hard drive had a stroke. The "Master File Table" (and apparently its back-up mirror) went bad somehow. I'd been good about data back-ups though, so it was frustrating more than anything, and really just forced me to do some spring cleaning. The bad thing about serious MFT issues is that recovering data is nigh impossible short of spending ludicrous data recovery company prices or sorting through thousands upon thousands of unnamed and unorganized files (think of finding a specific MP3 without any artist, album, or track names). Here's where things get really annoying though: My data partition (personal stuff, MP3s, downloads, archives, etc...) was all intact, so ideally I'd just reformat the main partition and reinstall Windows. I didn't, however, bet on Windows XP automatically redefining my partitions because it couldn't detect the full 320GB of my hard drive (such feats require service packs to be installed; something that isn't done until after this stage in the installation). That's right, rather than just report that it couldn't detect the already-defined partitions, it decided to rape them. The data partition was then in the same state as the main partition. Long story short, rather than spend what would have quite literally taken days of mind-numbingly tedious recovery work, I bit the bullet and started clean. The lesson? Do not attempt to install Windows on a drive larger than 137GB that already has data on it, even if it's on another partition. It wasn't a complete loss though; I had my 6000+ MP3s, my school-related documents, most of my photos, bookmarks, e-mails, and instant messenger history backed-up in at least two other places.