Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

-- Peter Rothman (at Salon.com)

This is the sort of highly nuanced advice that you can't get just anywhere, folks.

That locked partition on your hard drive, and/or the full restoration utility on the disk will get your machine working again, assuming that nothing let the magic smoke out or suffered a similarly traumatic hardware failure. However, what they neglect to tell you anywhere in their unhelpful help files or labyrinthine online support forums, is that this fully operational battle station Windows installation is going to be the bare-assed, factory-fresh, DEAR GOD YOU ERASED MY ENTIRE BOOT DRIVE YOU &$^%#^) one that arrived on your doorstep way back when.

I hope you didn't have anything important saved on C:/. Documents? All your installed applications? Address book? Bookmarks? Pornog- personal photo archives? Poof. Hasta la Vista, baby.

They don't tell you that fdisk and format are part of that recovery process until, "Oopsie! Too late." In an office space where your IT staff has every application disk known to man, and many other ways to obtain lost data (network backups, copies on other users' workstations, etc), this nuke-and-pave modus operandi is merely an inconvenience. For home users with only one PC and, shall we say, less-than-optimized disaster recovery provisions, this can be a one stop self-service disaster, and it's almost entirely preventable. Manufacturers could (no, strike that, amplify it) -- they should -- go back to giving us Honest-to-Dog copies of our OS on disk instead of these bastardized branded abominations. You paid for that software license, you ought to receive the media. Period. Their bottom line ought not to trump the end user's experience at the most trying of times.

Why does anyone buy OEM builds? Oh, yeah - they come with a warranty if your hardware wets the bed. Frequent visitors here probably are of a similar mindset to your humble scribe -- hardware failures are an inconvence, but provide an outstanding excuse to upgrade an ailing component. And, as an added bonus, with off the shelf components, you won't be reduced to hunting down obscure proprietary drivers from the vendor's site.

All of which is small consolation if and when the time comes for a full system rebuild, but when you have the OS in your hot little hands, and the caffeinated or alcoholic beverage necessary for you to cope with the situation near to hand, at least you have more options than Do Nothing and Start Over From Square One.


Rafe Brox spends his days wielding a phone in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. When not causing friends and enemies alike to /facepalm electronically, he can be found extolling the virtues of the weird peripherals in his life, from kettlebells to the Trackman Marble. If you also share an unhealthy passion for PC hardware or know a good place he can get help for this addiction, the target coordinates are rafe.brox AT weblogsinc DOT com.