Lest you think Ralph Sir Edward is never goofs up......
My brother comes by this morning with a computer making a rasping noise. He thinks the boot drive is going bad. I'm busy loading data to a USB hard drive. I give him a spare drive in a removable cartridge. Sound goes away and then comes back. Swap hard drive to other cases with fans, still noise. Diagnosis - bad fan in system case.
Brother wants to back up boot drive onto the drive I gave him. OK, I have him bring over the boot drive and the drive he want it loaded to. Shut down my machine. Put both of his hard drives in the data drives slots on my machine. Ready to go. Try booting up my machine. Dies when the floppy kicks in. OMG. Pull out his packs. Try to boot the machine. Fails again, same place. Try using the recovery disk. Machine never gets to reading the CD drive. Swap my System pack to another operation system. Fail again. Oh <bleep>. Can't get at the BIOS with F2. Plug a USB thumb drive in. No dice! I must have hammered the BIOS! Break out the netbook for Googling a seven year old machine's BIOS. Can I restore it? SOL.
Brother is upset (so am I!) that trying to help him croaked my machine. Offers to buy a cheap replacement. Go shopping and find a $189 refurb from IBM/Dell (Pentium 4 @ 2.93 Ghz + XP Pro). I planned to gut it and put the innards into my existing case.
Get home. It's been a trying 4 hours. Open box and get docs to read at my study chair. Turn my head. Remember I was backing up data to an USB hard drive?
Drive light is on...
Turn off USB Hard Drive. System boots perfectly....
If brains were dynamite, I wouldn't have enough to blow my own nose...