Ok, here's a story.
I had decided to take the plunge and install Vista. Since I had XP Pro previously I bought the Vista Home Premium edition. According to microsoft, a clean install is recommended. As well, my hard drive space was nearly used up, so I decided to add another 250 gb SATA II drive. I already had 1-SATA II drive and 2-ATA133 drives. Plus the optical drives as well.
So to start, I wanted to install Vista on a partition on the new drive. I installed and and during the process rearranged the inside of my pc, ie moved hard drives to different slots. While doing so, I must have exchanged the 2 ATA 133 drives between master & slave.
Now, it's been at least a year since I reformatted or install an OS, so don't laugh too hard eh?
So I go to install Vista and boot from the DVD. DVD finds only the two SATA drives, so I say no worry, I'll just keep installing. The new SATA drive was lettered J:, and the existing SATA (with XP still on it, ya, I know), was lettered C:. But wait, what's this? Vista won't accept my XP Pro key since this edition of Vista is an upgrade... excuse me? Fine... so I install XP Pro on the J drive, thinking I can change it to C latter on.... oh how I was wrong (I really really thought I could as some point in the past).
XP Pro installed... still only the same drives showing in windows.... strange. I left it to some motherboard drivers not being installed yet (had that problem before). So I throw in the Vista dvd and upgrade from within windows. Install goes fine, reboot, and still no drives. Oh , can't switch J: to C: even after I change the existing C: drive. %@#!.
Finally realize that I must have messed up the existing drive connections. So before I reinstall windows in order to get it on C:, I decide to fix the other drives. 20 reboots later and as many curses, I finally get the drives to show up in Device Manager. But wait... even thought it says they are working, they aren't in My Computer. I open up Disk Management... and voila... It's saying "Not Initialized" for the 2 disks. So I try Initializing them, thinking they would work. Keep in mind these were my 2 storage disks. Nope, that didn't work as they don't have a drive letter now. Fine, I'll give them one. Uh oh... now they say all space is unallocated. Well $@^# me.
So having at least solved the problem of the drives being recognized, I turn off the pc, disconnect all drives except the new one (keeping note of the cables), and installing vista on C: this time. Yay, finally. Reboot and the other drives are still showing as all space unallocated (ie no partition), but yet have drive letters. Since they stored all my digital photos since 2003 and my songs/movies etc adding up to 400 GB, I didn't want to risk formatting them.
I spent 2 solid days (a Saturday and Sunday) recovering files on the drives and moving them to the SATA drives so I could format. At least the files still had filenames... unlike a time before
. Get that done, move everything back, and finally, what feels like 4 days later (oh wait, it was 4)... the pc is finally running and operational. Sort of... this is still Vista were talking about, so it will never be 100% operational for a while.
There, how's that?
Then there's the stories in the late 90's when back door trojans were the best trick to pull on someone. Ah Netbus and Back Orifice... how you never failed me. Played many a tricks on classmates, teachers, and family. Then they started to be recognized by virus agents... damn.