One of my hard drives had a bad sector.
As a result of that, Windows destroyed two and a half hard drives worth of data.
[Redacted]
@david So it's not really 2 1/2 drives of data gone... it's 1 drive unbootable even though the data's fine, 1/2 drive I wiped out for no reason, and 1 drive that's actually lost. Though I have Testdisk looking to see if it can find the old partitions. But I don't know exactly what the "recovery" wipe did, so who knows.
Half the data is backed up in like four places. The other half was backed up... in the space I cleared out to clone Windows.
@phen314 Yikes... yeah, that is really really sucktacular
@david Yep. Thankfully TestDisk got back the partition that wasn't backed up, so aside from a few notes in my notes file that would be gaming related and not that important, I should be back to where I was before the "recovery" run... with an unbootable computer.
@david
1. Bad sector on Hard Drive A, where Windows lives. Refuses to boot.
2. I load up Parted Magic. All data on A is fine. OK, I have space on Hard Drive B. Let me create a new partition and clone A onto that partition, and set that to be the boot partition.
3. Refuses to boot.
4. Fine, it needs an install. Load up Windows Recovery disk. Do a recovery install. It immediately starts doing something without asking where to do it or saying what "it" is. Turns out, it chose to do "it" to Hard Drive C, the only one of the three without a Windows installation on it, and "it" is wipe out the entire drive and repartition it. I do not know this yet.
5. It fails to install and says, "No changes have been made".
6. Fine, it needs a real install. Pull out the Windows setup disk. This time it lets me choose where. I pick the partition where I had cloned the drive into; I'll just reclone after it does whatever boot stuff it needs to do. Nope, "can't install there".
7. Fine, the docs say for that error, delete the partition and make a new one. So I do. Nope, "can't install there".
8. I give up.
9. Back to Parted Magic for... I don't even remember. Notice my wallpaper that I had saved last time didn't load. Went to look for it. Noticed there was no partition of the size I was expecting.
10. Made angry tweet.