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View Full Version : Bad reformatting experience...post yours!


lesman
03-20-2005, 01:40 AM
HERES MINE!

I had a horrible exerience...some may have noticed I havent posted in about 40 something hours or so...well, not to go into too much detail, I'm getting married soon, just got a new job, and the house is being crazily redone....in the middle of this, somehow I decided it was time to give my computer a nice refreshing format...ahh...a clean registry...cleaned hard drive...etc etc etc...but it wasn't that easy....noooo....as few might recall, my current setup used to be an emachines, but after a whole lot of modification, inside and out, it now looks cooler and runs better. but then came time to reformat.

Now, deep deep down it's still an emachines, and I found that out when I went to reformat (or reload windows, whatever you wanna say) so I pop in the reformat/reload disc and reboot. Voila! I wish actually. It gets to the point where I name my computer....after I rename the son of a bitch...it hangs. Just sits there, taking its sweet ass time doing nothing. PROBLEMATIC! My girlfriend and I know next to no one else who has a computer other than ourselves, and she has some college papers due NOW....great....I'm scared for my life...I dont want to call emachines to see if there's some back door to this because Im afraid they'll tell me to send it in or something (if I did send it in theyd think it was some retard thinking it was already april fools day or something).

Since the only copy of windows that I currently own is on the "emachines only" disk, and all the software I JUST ERASED FROM C DRIVE is on the disc....I'm very scared and dont want to try ANYTHING other than keep putting in the reformat disc.....I eventually have no choice but to call emachines....I work up a little courage and do so. So then I called up emachines and to my simple joy they tell me just to press F8 and enable VGA mode. It boots just fine, and then I eventually get to the desktop. WOW...been a while since I've seen 800x600 screen resolution and 8 bit color depth! Talk about some eye-trash! I quickly fix that and all goes well. Then I bust out the service pack 2 and its goin' good! That is until the computer has to reboot. It shuts down for that split second like its supposed to, its all goin' good, the loading status bars are now a different color, as thats what happens, and then they stop moving....it's happened before for a few seconds...but that few seconds turns into a few minutes....then I get pissed off. SO.....I use the restore DVD AGAIN! Try doing it normal for my minds curiosity...does the same thing...name the computer...it hangs....so I restart and push F8....try that...BUT IT DOESNT WORK...

So I called emachines (needed my activation key in any case any way) and turns out instead of clicking "cancel" on an option I was pushing "ok"....stupid me...stupid me....then everything goes ok from there...except now I have to reload al my programs...put in all my backup...download all the windows security updates, reinstall the graphics card (which happens to be a pain in the ass with this emachines) After some trouble and a few other cliffs, I finally get it back to how it was...without all the fucked up registry keyes, and cluttered drives. The only thing is, I'm running service pack 1...thats safe, right? I mean, it should be, as long as I have all the updates, latest antivirus and spyware programs, correct? Well, thats the story of how I got scared, aggrivated, and incredibly stressed out...but hey, the computers clean, the carpet is new, and I'm happy now...just figured I'd share this story with you guys....in fact, I'm changing the topic of this thread....its now post youre most horrible reformat/reloading experience!

lesman
03-20-2005, 03:05 PM
Umm...bump! C'mon, I wanna hear YOUR sob stories! :p

ThomasE66
03-20-2005, 03:07 PM
I've never had a bad formating experience.

Hey, here's a hint. People might respond more if you learn how to use paragraphs ;)

Bullitt
03-20-2005, 03:15 PM
the only bad formatting experience I had was with an older compaq (athlon 750). I was trying to get 2k onto the box and it would not format to NTFS properly. Did quick, did full, always failed during file copy. This went on to a point where I zeroed the hard drive, formatted again, copy files, failure. After 8 hours of this, verified the drive with manufacturer utils, all checked out 100% good. The ninth hour, I went to the bios to see some weird option about OS. It was set to Windows, but on a hunch, I changed it to :"non-windows" and it went smoothly.

It was the final nail in the "I'll never touch a compaq" coffin.

lesman
03-20-2005, 03:17 PM
I've never had a bad formating experience.

Hey, here's a hint. People might respond more if you learn how to use paragraphs ;)
Well....I....I just....ok, yeah, I have no excuse. ;) :p I'll go back and edit it.

Patman
03-22-2005, 09:37 PM
I have been down the road of reformatting probably 50-75 times, keep in mind I am only 16. Some of the no-goes weren't important. An IBM Aptiva with 8mb of ram and 512mb - hard drive space. Some old 200-400mhz computers blue screening etc. Those were all for fun and didnt matter. But just recently, wow this one sucks...

Working over at my good friends house. Backed up some files, went in for the reformat got to registering components-froze. Ok Ok its 10 on a school night, I can still make it. Reboot, restart the install. This time I moved the mouse around to keep it active-BSOD, thank you microsoft. In the end heavy duty forces were called in to overcome me (I know I could have done it if I took it home for the night). I lost, the most likely overheating computer one. I am a failure.

lesman
03-22-2005, 09:55 PM
Sorry to hear that my friend...sorry to hear that.

digiram
03-23-2005, 01:10 AM
Only one I have, really, is when I was reinstalling Windows XP for my brother and it kept rebooting while copying the Installation files. I though it was the disc, thought it was the optical drive, thought it was the hard drive, and in the end, it ended up being bad ram.

The end.