[mikhael]

Well, like the title says, I b0rked it.

My contract ended at my previous job, so I'm job hunting, and more importantly, I had to give back my laptop. No Laptop means no FreeBSD, means no programming environment for me. So....

When I went to reinstall FreeBSD on my desktop here at home, so I could have a programming environment I liked again, I screwed up and overwrote my boot sector with the FreeBSD boot loader. That let me boot my FreeBSD partitions, but not my Win2k partitions. When I went and fixed the boot sector, I basically screwed up and lost access to all my partitions.

Today, after a reinstall of Win2k, I'm able to boot properly to both my FreeBSD and Win2k partitions, I just seem to have misplaced the partitions that had all my 3d stuff and all my mp3s. I'm slowly recovering important things from hither and yon, but its going to be a while, so it may be a good long time before I'm even remotely productive for anything and anyone again.

[edit]
Allow me to add, btw, that I'm not best pleased by the Win2k Recovery Console, nor am I best pleased with Win2k in general at this moment. Win2k didn't screw up here, I'm the one that screwed up, but let me point out a few things that made life more difficult:
1) Boot.ini, one of the most critical boot files on your 2k box is a text file. If you need to do anything with it from the Recovery Console, you can't, because the RC doesn't include a text editor of any sort that I could find. This is dumber than letting Diebold build voting machines.
2) Microsoft doesn't roll recent patches into the installers for various software. Adding a service patch for a piece of software spawned four more required patches for the patched version.
3) Given the number of patches that require reboots and the number of patches that explicitly check for if you've rebooted since the last reboot-requiring patch, I ended up spending the better part of a day getting Win2k and all applications patched back where they should have been.
4) Something I couldn't help but laugh at: it takes me less time to install FreeBSD 4.9 from scratch and get logged in on the console than it takes for a fully installed Win2k installation to boot to the desktop. I'd never noticed that before. I swear, if WINE handled Lightwave better, I'd not have even bothered to reinstall Win2k.
[/edit]

[Kazan]

there are some farely decent modeling environments for linux i hear (maya)

[Sandwich]

Oh, Mik - that's screwed up...

[Singh]

if you have a DOS diskette, you may simply look at the command EDIT boot.ini since it will display an editor that can edit text files

And yes, im a bit of a dos freak...if all else fails, get windows 3.1 and edit the core critical stuff if you have to :/

[mikhael]

There's two problems with that, Singh. First, I have no floppy drive. I haven't used floppies in... um... like two years. Second, the partition is NTFS, not FAT. DOS disks wouldn't help. Realistically, the problem wasn't the boot.ini, I was just annoyed that there wasn't a text editor available from the recovery console. A statically linked vi would have been rockin.

Seriously though, the problem is mainly one of my own making. The way I've built this machine is pretty wonky in the first place. BSD is on the first primary partition of the primary master IDE drive. 2k is on the second primary partition of the primary master IDE drive. the 2k partition is set active, and the BSD one is not. I use the 2k boot manager to call BSDs boot1 (the kernel loader). If those two partitions had been reversed this wouldn't really have been too bad to fix. Likewise, if I'd been paying attention when I was doing the install, I wouldn't have let it screw with the boot sector.

Kaz, I honestly can't stand Maya (and its really out of my league). I prefer Lightwave so I'm stuck. Its something I can deal with though.

[Setekh]

Yeowch. This has happened to me before, Mik - hope you're back up on your feet soon.

[Nuclear1]

Ouch.

And plus, the title says b0rked, f00

[Taristin]

There are programs that can retrieve files from lost partitions. I 'acquired' one from someone who's name will remain nameless, when my PC fux0red my HDD... It could help?

[mikhael]

I didn't lose much data, just the very very recent stuff (since hte last backup). what really hurts is that I lost my environment.

Previously everything (especially Lightwave) was configured very carefully around my work flow, etc. In reinstalling Windows, I lost the configurations for everything and now I'm kind of having to refit everything back together where it belongs.

Its slowly coming back together though.

[Taristin]

I know just how that is. I did it to myself about 3 times now...

[Thorn]

I consider myself lucky. I havent had any major losses in over a year. I'm kinda playing with fire right now though. All of my backup HDs are full, and I'm out of blank CDs.... Have to delete some of the stuff I'll never use anymore...

[vyper]

I've had two reinstalls over the past three months. All configs away with it. Not critical but arse-irritating.