Biggest PC Building Mistakes From The Community

Storage Mistakes: Stories From The Community

Over the years, data and drive management has become extraordinarily easier than it used to be. It seems like there wasn't much you could do to avoid a drive problem in the 1990s. You had to know how to configure jumpers, cables and BIOS to get the drives running, and then you had to be careful to baby the drives physically, and then in the operating system to be sure your data wouldn't just vanish. Using optical discs and floppy disks were, if anything, more problematic. Because it was so much easier to make a mistake when dealing with storage back then, it is only natural that several of these blunders occurred more than a decade ago.

I'm sure that "ComputerSecurityGuy" was excited to leave this era of problematic storage devices behind, but he first needed to move the data to a new drive. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to have gone well.

"I was migrating a box of ancient 1.44MB floppies, and I picked up the drive and moved it while it was running. Yep, it killed all the files on the floppy."

Magnets can be helpful, but you shouldn't forget where you put them. Especially not if you are taking out an HDD. I hope you had your data backed up "Ryan_78."

"I had a spare hard drive and I was cleaning my room and put my magnetic tray for screws on it..... didn't see it till 10 months later."

The next submission comes from one of our most active forum moderators, "USAFret." Don't you miss those days when you could completely obliterate everything on your system with the push of a button or by typing "Format C:"?

Windows 98 era.Wanting to delete everything off a drive or partition.Select ALL, Delete.Oops....that was the C drive.Windows got about 1/3 way through before I saw what was happening.Oh well, reinstall.----------------------------------------------------About 5 yrs ago...Seagate 2TB external drive.Sony laptop.Blink, the drive disappears.Blink, it's back.Blink, it disappears again.PANIC...dying drive! Or maybe the enclosure.Destroy the external case getting the drive out, so I can get the data off it.Plug it in....copy the data to another drive.All is good.No, the drive wasn't dying. Nor was the USB enclosure.The USB port on the laptop was dying, causing random disconnects.Still using that drive in my HTPC/house server today."

Optical discs still have their uses, but be careful they aren't too old and worn out. If they are, they might just explode into a million pieces like "jeffler383's" did. I'm amazed the drive worked again. Too bad about the disc though. Baldur's Gate 2 was one of my favorite games too.

"I was attempting to install one of my all time favorite games, Baldur's Gate 2, off the original game CD's I had from back in 2000. I failed to notice that after 8 or 9 years there were several spider cracks on the clear plastic on the inner portion of one of the disks...well that thing spun up and I was greeted to the sound of a CD shattering inside the drive at several thousand rpm. the drive bay wouldn't open - when I took it out of the computer it sounded like a maraca, there must have been hundreds of CD shards inside it. I took it apart and somehow managed to remove enough of the debris to where it would work again, though I wasn't able to get all the pieces out. My roomate at the time got a good laugh out of that one."

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