Tips when reinstalling Windows

1. DON’T LEAVE YOUR USB DRIVE PLUGGED IN WHEN REINSTALLING A SYSTEM WITH WHICH YOU ARE UNFAMILIAR

Yeah… that was yelling. Really at myself, not at you.

So my brother-in-law brings his laptop to my house to wipe it out, reformat and reinstall Windows XP. No biggy, right. So we plug in my USB Hard Drive to backup all his data. It was going to be easy, right. Back it up, then once done installing, pull all the data back over. Nice and simple.

So after the reinstall, I go to plug the USB HD back into the laptop and nothing. Hrm… the drive shows up, but when clicking on it, it says that it needs to be formatted.

“Interesting… we must not have all the right drivers re-installed. Let me try it on my machine.”

DOH! Didn’t work on my machine either. Huh… what could have happened. Think… think.

Oh wait… so while selecting the drive to install XP onto, I noticed two different drives. No biggy, perhaps he had two drives in his machine. I of course asked… he didn’t know for sure, so I just deleted the partitions on both drives and created new ones.

After spending 30 min trying to figure out what was wrong with my HD, I realized what I had done! Stupid, stupid, stupid! So I wipped out all my data on the drive as well as the data we had just backed up for my bro-in-law. Boy do I feel like an idiot!

Just wanted to share my new found wisdom 😉