24 nerve-racking hours.
Yesterday, at about this same time, I messed up the machine so badly that XP was no longer visible, and I could only get into DOS. DOS really is a dark system. The C drive where my XP system was, and the D and E drives where my files were, were all gone. Every time the machine booted, there was only one huge C drive letter.
I put the WINXP installation disc into the CD-ROM drive, the drive would spin, but it still went into DOS.
I changed the machine to boot from the CD-ROM drive, and it still went into DOS.
I had no choice but to use the machine's built-in recovery program to restore the original system, but the machine reported a hard disk error. That was as far as it got. And after that, it couldn't even get into DOS from the hard disk anymore.
At that point, everything was hopeless. In the evening there was a Dragon Boat Festival dinner gathering, and I had no spirit for it at all.
I asked a colleague, and under drive A I could boot DOS and also see drives D and E, which made me very happy. I could use the CD-ROM drive to install WINXP. But that was as far as it could go, because my colleague said that as he remembered it, installing XP would wipe the entire physical hard disk.
My colleague gave me the phone number of IBM maintenance staff. I couldn't sleep all night, worried that the files would be destroyed, and there were other people's things in the machine too.
Today, IBM personnel came on-site for service. After more than two hours of struggling, they first planned to copy the files out and then install XP. Using the
boot CD he brought, they could see all the files in the machine. But as for whether the files could be copied to a mobile hard disk, the IBM technician said he wasn't sure,
and said that if there was no other way, I would have to personally format my hard disk, and he could guide me from the side; he was afraid of taking that responsibility.
The technician was about to copy the files. He switched to another menu, apparently one with NTFS support, and suddenly discovered that drive C couldn't be found. After thinking a bit, he used
the PQMAGIC program to remove the HIDDEN status from my C drive. After rebooting, XP appeared.
Normally I never think the XP screen at boot time looks like anything special, but at that moment, its beauty could only be understood by someone who has had a similar experience.
The lesson this time is that playing with DOS and operating systems can easily lead to major problems. One should act with caution. As things that are just for fun, it's really hard to say what value they have.
As long as the machine works normally and meets your needs, that's enough. If you play until something goes wrong, who can you count on to save you? The most direct consequence is that your work gets delayed and you get chewed out by the boss!
