Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 21:06:16 +1000 From: Greg Black <gjb@comkey.com.au> To: "G. Adam Stanislav" <zen@buddhist.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Horror story Message-ID: <19990314110617.11747.qmail@alpha.comkey.com.au> In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.19990313090839.008ded20@mail.bfm.org> of Sat, 13 Mar 1999 09:08:39 CST References: <36E9D60C.F26F86EE@uswest.net> <3.0.6.32.19990313090839.008ded20@mail.bfm.org>
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There's an important lesson here, for anybody installing or upgrading any operating system. [Details snipped.] > I do not want to reinstall Windows from scratch: I would lose years of > data, and I have no problems with my existing Windows installation (besides > the usual problem of it being Windows, of course :->). [...] > This is very frustrating: Not only did I lose my original FreeBSD 2.2.8 > installation I had on my first drive for months, [...] This sort of thing should never happen. With any Unix variant that I have used in the last million years, you are warned about it. I have no idea if the drones from Redmond provide similar warnings, but I'd be surprised if they didn't. What's the warning? BACK UP ANYTHING THAT MATTERS **BEFORE** YOU START. Sorry for shouting, but this is the single most important instruction. If you have data on your disks that you don't wish to lose and for some peculiar reason you are either unwilling or unable to back it up, either physically remove the disk with the precious data or forget about the installation until you have backed up your data. There are no reasons ever to ignore this advice, no matter how much you know or how much experience you have or how clever you are. Things go wrong. Backups allow you to recover. This response does nothing to help solve the actual problem, of course -- but I haven't followed the saga carefully enough to be able to say anything constructive about that and other people are trying to help. However, the warning here needs to be seen and heeded by everybody. -- Greg Black <gjb@acm.org> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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