Hindsight is always 20/20, you'll see the mistakes as I go along.

I managed to self inflict a total drive wipeout on me, and here's how.

Some background, this all happened on Monday, Feb.19, 2007, day before Madri Gras, and if you don't know what M.G. is, you're blessed. If you know about it, but have never experienced it, you're lucky. If you know exactly why I didn't want to go drive back to work to get a rescue disk at 6 in the evening, you understand the reasons. Anyways, the brief timeline:

5:30 Got home, decided to uninstall my Norton products to fix them according to Symantec.
5:40 Uninstalled, system needs rebooting. Great.
5:42 Boot Error: C:\winnt\system32\config\system is corrupt.
6:10 10 reboots later, various attempts with F8 & booting with W2K install disk (which cannot find my windows on the drive), break out the spare boot CD.

The spare boot CD is an old recovery disk for WinME. Never used it to install ME, but it does go to a command prompt with NTFS support, so don't knock it. I needed the NTFS support because my Ghost images were on my M drive which was NTFS. The CD also got Ghost on it so I could get at the latest image and restore the OS. So, ...

6:15 Restore last image from M, ejected CD and rebooted.
6:30 After a few minutes, W2K says, "Can't find user profiles." (Huh?)
6:45 4 F8 optioned reboots later, insert boot disk again, go to command prompt. Change to user profile drive. (G)

Invalid Drive Letter.

Oh ****!

Apparently, in restoring the C drive, ghost wiped my entire drive and made it one solid FAT32 drive, ... Now I'm truely annoyed. Not only did I lose my work from my C drive, but all my other tinkers on the rest of the array is gone too.

Darn.

Still not a terribly big issue, I have incrementials till 2/10/07, so I resized the partition and tried to get the command line Ghost to restore the extended partition. No go. So, I braved traffic and got the Better Boot Disk, a Bart CD.

7:30 Boot Bart. Reformatted the extended partition, learned something about Ghost Explorer on restore. If you highlight the "Drive" in the left plane and tell it to restore, it restores the drive into a folder by the name of the "Drive". Bummer.

8:00 Finally got the sucker to restore properly, rebooted computer. Strange critter boots, a desktop I ain't seen in over a year. Plus all sorts of software errors.

Turns out that the C drive I restored with the command line Ghost was from a really old image, and the rest of the drives were from the correct image. But this was not found out till the morning when I took a fresh tack at it. In the meanwhile, I spent about 2 hours trying to convince the OS to at least connect to the internet! But no dice. Went to bed at 10:00.

So, I spent all day Tuesday, which was supposed to be a fun day off, choring over the restore of my system, which is now comprised of a 12/30/06 image restore plus incrementials until 2/10/07. So, overall, I recovered over 99% of my work, and think I've done a better part of recreating the remaining 1% in the past several days.

Moral? Before attempting to uninstall something so tied into your system as Norton, BackItUpFirst. And never again buy a Norton Product.

BTW: After going through all that, figured it was something I did wrong on the uninstall, so I attempted it again, but only after doing a fresh backup of the drive array before touching the uninstall, and yep, something is definately buggered on the Norton uninstall. Heck, something's buggered on the Norton period otherwise I wouldn't have to take elaborate steps to uninstall.