Got a very very bad day on Fri night, ops, Sat morning.

Was hunting in Unrest with DF, he was helping me with the Acumen Mask
quest. We took in 2 newbie healers, and the hunt supposed to end quite
early but one of the 2 healers was a damn CCB looter. Already told them in
advance they can get all the loot except the NO DROP, worthless darkbone
skull (while DF get some xp), yet this KNN idiot go and loot the 1st skull.
In the end no choice, hunt longer.

Shortly after I got the skull, I stayed back with DF, hoping to get him a
BS tunic to sell, thanks for his companion and help. While standing on the
fountain, suddenly my screen turned blue! I tried all means to close the
blue screen (infamous win9x GPF) but system simply hanged. No choice, so I
turned off my PC and turned it on again. When I rebooted, win98 did it
normal scandisk and this time it showed many corrupted files, crosslinks
etc. No choice, I get all of them fixed. Just before it reached the win98
desktop screen, system halted again! I kept trying to load my PC and the
same old thing keep coming back - files/directory corrupted and system had
to rename file/directories...until a stage it renamed my win.com file!!!
Damn PC finally down as it can't even load it's win98! I struggled for 2
hrs (till 6am in the morning) and gave up.

The next time, Sat, the saga continued. Again I tried to boot from CDrom,
FDD etc but system simply dun worked. In the end I selected boot from
win98 CDrom and reinstall win98. Still got file errors during scandisk but
I managed to install my win98. Next I went on to install all drivers
etc...damn...pc lock-up again. When I rebooted...scandisk got error, fix
file and rename...the same old cycle con't. Everytime it scandisk, it
found more corrupted and crosslinked files (and it renamed more files just
to fixed them). I kept on scandisk, reinstall win98 until I fall asleep in
front of my PC (wake up and 6am Sunday and realized the damn thing still
scandisking!!!).

In the end, Sun morning....gave up. Try my very best to retrieve my data
using dos prompt but still lost many important files. Some files, like
ICQ/DB/*.* files, all got cut-short becoz the filename > 8 chars and dos
prompt can only copy max 8.3 files. Anyway no choice. Ard noon time,
completed data CR mission. Becoz of so many corrupted and crosslink files,
I decided to reformat my HDD thoroughly, by using LOW-LVL formnat! The
format (8.4GB hdd) took me so long....from noon to night 10pm plus!!!
After that, I spend like 3 hrs reinstalling all my drivers, ISP, MS
office, EQ (included patching online) etc. By the time I finally patching
EQ, already 1am plus. Login EQ just to get my char out of unrest (heng,
still alive, hehe). Sigh, dun even got time to install UO (UO got longer
online patch than EQ). Maybe tonight I will con't with my PC CR mission ;(

All my The Sim goodies are gone (gotta re-train my 'perfect-skilled' sims),
my chars and treasures found in BG and GB expanion, my UO and EQ
macro/hotkey list etc....sigh.

Now I know the importance of HDD backup. Anyone got any good CDRW machine
to introduce? Shld I get internal or external one? I dun think I can
afford SCSI, so any EIDE or parallel port version is good enuff. Pls
recommend.

p/s: Died by DROWNING (in DC) while trying to do the ice comet quest. How
long can mage's water stone last? Maybe someone can summon me a few when I
do the quest again this or next week. Ouch, also dropped lvl...gotta go
back kill dwarves again, hehe.

Ziltus, the real CR man!