I just had one of the worst day's I've had in a good while. Let me just go over the story with you quickly. I had this little 14GB HD that I was going to slap red hat on and just play with, since I'm not that well versed in Linux. I decided to put an XP install on there too, just in case I ever needed it for anything. Anyhow, I'm sure as hell glad I did that. After the XP install went ok, I started with Linux. I've installed it a few times before, but never on a system that had SATA drives. I got all the way to the screen where it lets you choose a HDD to install it on, and it gave me some warning about the data being corrupted on the HDD and it would have to erase all the data. I assumed this had to be this new drive as Linux wouldn't have my raid driver and wouldn't pick up my drives (as XP doesn't pick them up when you don't give it the drivers). In assuming this was the new IDE drive, I went ahead and let it erase the "corrupted" partition. Anyhow, to my absolute delight, Linux had indeed found my SATA drives and obviously mistaken the fact they were in a RAID array for being a corrupted partition. It deleted both drives partitions and after I saw that I felt the bottom drop out of my stomache. As just the other day I had planned to grab a cheap 80GB IDE and back up a few of my more important files. I hadn't backed up anything. The only thing I had moved to this IDE XP install were my nforce drivers and catalyst drivers. I have dial up at the moment, so it'd take me at least two weeks to get back most of my major programs that I haven't backed up. I didn't lose anything that was extremely important, but it is definitely a hassle. The only good to come out of it was the fact that I needed to format anyway as my cluster size was too big for windows to defrag. I could never defrag so my disk performance was starting to drop significantly. It was about as fast as this old crappy IDE drive I'm on. Pretty slow. Anyhow, take a lesson from my stupidity. When dealing with a foreign OS and SATA drives, make sure the damn thing won't see them as two independent drives and format them thinking they're corrupted partitions.
thats why I run Acronis TrueImage backup EVERY weekend. I've been in those situations too often. I've smashed a few HDDs with a hammer out of frustrations a few times as well.
