...and was wise enough to make a backup DVD image of my HD.

This morning, I booterd uop my machine, and I got a rather unwelcoming message: 'Error -- Missing Operating System"

I don't really know what hapened. I would suspect a virus or malware, but my last scan came up clean and I hadn't done anything signifigant as far as installations since then. I routinely scan everything I download, and I doubt that it could have been a drive-by malware download, b/c I use firefox 99.99% of the time, and it is pretty much immune to such exploits.

Before i went out and bought Ghost, reformatting was a serious decision. Even though I could get windows installed igain in an hour, It would take me about a week or so to completely reinstall my software and get everything the way I wanted it.

I fixed the problem in 15 min. by re-imaging my drive.

To give this thread a purpose, post your worst most-recent computer distaster.

I'm glad you got your computer fixed easily. My worst situation goes as follows...

Me and my dad wanted to have a 98/XP Dual boot... we selected what we thought was an empty drive and formated it to put 98 on it. Little did we realize this was the physical primary drive on the computer we had installed Xp to the secondary drive. When we formated it we destroyed an index file XP used to link itself over from the primary drive that boots first to the secondary drive where the files were. So I basically lost everything and had to rebuild from scratch. It really was an awful day... I was really upset.

I lost 60 gigs of stuff after my secondary hard drive crashed a few months ago.

bump... surely the rest of you have had problems... you're all using MS windows, right? :p

Disaster? I don't really have disasters. I just have problems. And recently, none of them have been major, there's just been about 20 different small ones that I can't solve.

I'm looking at starting over within the next week. Not what I want to do, but it'll help.

Nope, never had a real major problem. A few small ones that were easily fixed.

MY last largish problemw as that I attempted to update my video drivers,a nd when i restarted my computer, it did not install the svga drivers which allow me to isntall the new video drivers over them. Vexed me for a day or so until i checked the bios and saw that some moron at the factory had set it up wrong so all I had to do was change a setting really quickly to let the bios handle the driver at startup, meaning it isntalled the svga driver properly.