[Renegade 13]

Of course I knew goddamn well formatting it would wipe the hard drive. As I mentioned, the XP restore disk I had did the formatting ON ITS OWN. I did not tell it to format. There was no menu to select "repair" from. Put the CD in the drive, boots automatically from the drive, starts the formatting automatically, no input from me involved. Nothing I could do once the "Recovery" disk was in...

Not worth recovering the data. As mentioned, it's personal stuff, pictures, shipsets, etc. Can't justify the expense to recover.

I know this was an issue of user error, but there is an aspect of poor design in this. Power failures don't exactly let XP do it's thing upon shutdown. Evidently, a power failure could [censored] things up as well, if what I did was sufficient to do it. It should be designed so the boot files aren't messed around with upon shutdown. I'm no expert (obviously) but it seems like there should be little need to, unless maybe there was a software change.

In this case "I can fix this" did fix it. It wrecked the data I had, but having a functioning computer with no data is better than a [censored] up computer that won't even boot! Sure, the problem was caused by me, but I'll be damned if I'll spend $60 per hour to get someone to fix it for me!

Live and learn. Backup data, have a real XP CD, not some bull**** "Recovery" CD that comes with the computer...