Microshit

Did I say that I "dislike" Microsoft? Wrong. I hate them, I loathe them, I despise them, I revile them, I curse and abhor and disdain and deplore and imprecate and execrate and contemn and spurn and abominate them. I piss on their shoes. I kick their pets. I fart in their general direction.

I spent four hours yesterday reinstalling Windows XP, in order to fix a problem which prevented the PC from connecting to the Internet. (In fairness I should state that this did fix the problem, just as amputating your arm at the shoulder will fix a hangnail.)

I was clever enough to fear that I might lose a file or two during the process, and so made a backup on CD of the database development and installer-maker files. What I didn't know, being a pampered Mac user, is that reinstalling Windows renders all data on the computer unuseable.

You see, when you reinstall Mac OS, it does nothing more than to reinstall the operating system; anything that isn't part of the OS is not touched. The list of users: unchanged. Those users' data: unchanged. The record of who-owns-what: unchanged. This is (dare I venture to opine) the way it should be.

I assumed, silly me, that Windows - which everyone tells me is a mature and reliable operating system - would be similarly user-friendly, not to say intelligent. Ha. It would be to laugh, were it not to cry.

Reinstalling Windows deletes the PC's list of users. It does not delete the now non-existent users' data, nor does it reassign these files to somebody else's ownership, oh no. They remain in place, but become unuseable - because they aren't yours. Not even the administrator login (once you figure out how to enable it) has enough authority to see these leftover files. You can't even delete them to free up the hard disk space, because they aren't yours.

Like Tantalus, you sit there and stare at the closed folders containing your data and applications, but cannot open them.

Moral of the story (and call this another public service announcement): should you ever (God forbid) need to reinstall Windows, then you might as well reformat the hard disk while you're at it - because you will lose all your data in any case.

[Updated on June 28] it is in fact possible to recover from this problem, and restore access to your data. I described how to do so in this post. But the rest stands: It is absurd and insulting, a thumb in the nose at their customers, that re-installing WinXP should cause this problem. Thanking the doctor for putting a cast on your leg does not make you forgive the drunken-fool-cardriver who ran over you.