After seeing a story dugg on digg about recovering after you “accidentally wipe your hard drive”, it reminded me of a story I often recount but have never blogged.
Many years ago I worked as a contract helpdesk operative for Deloitte & Touche in London. They had a number of offices we supported near Blackfriars. I worked there around the time that Windows 3.11 was getting popular. Many of the employees used Microsoft Office under Windows 3.11 on desktop PCs that had a roughly standard build.
One particular employee had been having serious issues with Word crashing and losing her work (ah, how things change [NOT!]). We had tried reinstalling the video driver, printer driver and of course Microsoft Office itself. The crashing kept happening, and she kept calling the helpdesk. Eventually the manager of the helpdesk sent me over there with the following instructions “Format the fucker!”. I took this to actually mean “arrange a time with the caller to wipe her hard disk and re-image it from a known good source, then customise it for her use, and thoroughly test it before handing it back”.
I explained that I was going to wipe the machine and would need a lunchtime to rebuild it. I turned up at her desk on the pre-arranged day at lunchtime with my bootable DOS floppy disk and my parallel laplink cable in hand. She went off to lunch with a collegue and I started. I booted off the floppy, formatted the hard disk and then used laplink to copy (re-image) the machine from the one next door (which we knew had no problems). When she came back from lunch I saw her logon and we tried to open a couple of documents just to sanity check the machine. I left her to it.
A few days later I happened to be passing her desk and thought I’d ask how things are going, here’s how the conversation went:-
(we’ll call her Jane, and her collegue will be Kim for this)
Me: "Hi Jane, hows it going, Word still crashing?" Jane: "No, not at all, it's much better" Me: "Great! Good to hear it cheerio.." Jane: "One thing.." Me: "Oh?" Jane: "Where's my hard disk?" Me: "Que?"
At this point Jane turns her display towards me showing she has Windows File Manager open. Kim also turns her screen towards me.
Jane: "This is Kims hard disk.."
(pointing to her own File Manager)
Jane: "Where is mine?" Me: "Weelllll.. It's gone" Jane: "!" Me: "I formatted it and copied from Kim.."
At this point Jane started to physically shake and become very distraught. I was told that’s it’s "best if you go now!".
It turns out that even though users were told time and time again to save their work “on the network” (in their home directory or a shared folder) they didn’t, they store stuff on their local C: drive. Who’d have thought it eh? 
Jane was in fact a Personal Assistant to one of the partners at D&T and so she was quite upset when she realised that the only copy of a book her boss was writing was on her hard disk. She made a sweep of the office for all floppy disks and eventually found an old copy of the book on one of them.
At the next few Christmas parties I’d hear (shouted across the venue) “Hey! That’s the bloke who formatted my hard drive!”. Glad I don’t work there any more, I would think that might get tiresome after 10 years!
I think Jane and I learned valuable lessons that day. She learned not that “saving on the C: drive is bad” but “HELPDESK PEOPLE DELETE YOUR DATA!”. I learned never to touch someone elses computer without offering a standard disclaimer first “you know that I could severely screw your machine, are you happy for me to continue?”.
4 Comments
I had a similar thing happen to me. Having carefully gone through the fact that I was about to ‘wipe his hard drive’, and that ‘everything would be gone’, and been reassured that he had ‘backed up all his data’, I proceeded to start the work. About 10 minutes in he popped his head around the door and said ‘will all my email still be there……?’. Needless to say, because he was on dialup with a POP3 email account, all his email was not there. Neither was his addressbook. Nor any one of a number of things that weren’t in ‘My Documents’……..
I worked for another IT support company years ago. We were contracted in to upgrade all the desktops from DOS/Windows 3.11 to Windows 95. In order to save any data loss the employees were told numerous times over the weeks leading up to the transition “if you want to keep anything, put it in c:\data”.
The plan was that we would turn up on friday night each brandishing a bootbale floppy disk. This disk had been carefully crafted to have the network drivers and netware gumpf to boot up and map a drive to a chunk of space on a netware server.
We would go to a machine, make a note if the serial number and input that into a script on the floppy disk. The boot floppy would then copy all the contents of c:\data to the netware server into a unique directory so that once the machines had been upgraded it could all be copied back down again. Sounds simple and elegant. It was except for one thing. Doom.
Pretty much every single employee wanted to “save” their copy of Doom so they could play again after the machines got upgraded. So we ended up with at least one compressed and uncompressed copy of Doom in the c:\data folders on every machine. The robot script on the floppy would duly attempt to copy these up to the server. Until of course the server was full. Full of duplicate copies of Doom.
At the time I was just a low level engineer on this job so I wasn’t part of the problem resolution team. Some of us low level monkey suggested deleting all copies of Doom from every machine before starting the copy. However it was pointed out that people might have saved valuable documents in their Doom folders, and who were we to arbitrarily delete other peoples data.
As I remember we went home and the upgrade was re-scheduled for another weekend.
You say that you have not blogged this story before. I, however, have read it before. Is that true or am I suffering from deja vu?
I haven’t blogged no, but you probably have seen the story before. I posted it back in January to the Hants LUG mailing list. Unfortunately the list is not open to the public so you can’t see the mail if you’re not subscribed. So following this link will be useless for most people, but for you and I we just need enter an email and password.
Of course this also means google can’t “see” that archive which means that if you had wanted to find the message I’d posted by searching for a key phrase that’s unlikely to occur in many places like “format the fucker” and laplink then you’d be out of luck.
Yet another reason that Hampshire Linux User Group should open its mailing list archive!