Tech Disasters

Post date: Jul 13, 2012 2:05:12 PM

Fun article on Ars Technica about things going horribly wrong with technology, causing data loss, etc.

Anecdote #2 reminded me of a situation of my own making:

At one point I, too, was dual-booting a machine with Windows and Linux, and had the Windows partitions (IIRC I had two -- one for programs and one for data) mounted on the Linux side in read/write mode. At one point, however, I had to re-install and re-partition Windows. The problem is that the Linux installation still had the partition geometry for the previous installation and was accessing the hard disk using those settings. I think after the first boot to Linux the entire Windows installation was corrupted, as it was writing to what it *thought* were free chunks of hard disk but what really had necessary Windows data.

Hard lesson learned.