So a few days ago on of my drives fails. It was the drive I had /home mounted on, with a small Windows partition. No big deal, I have backups and I can be back to where I was in only a few hours. I order a replacement drive and it arrived yesterday.
Here's where I screwed up. I put the new drive in, and start the Windows installation. I answer all the questions, and select a partition on the new disk as the install target. With the installation happily moving along, I go take a shower.
I come back and find that chkdisk is running. To my horror, I see that it's on my backup drive and it's "recovering" thousands of files. A large portion of what was an exact backup of my home directory is now residing in a folder called "found.000". Sorting through the files isn't really an option as they are helpfully named things like "file0038.chk". They also don't have any indication of where they originated from.
For good measure, Windows also overwrote my bootloader, because there's no possible way you'd want to run more than one operating system on a computer.
The good news is that I have remote backups. It's only through a trading arrangement through a friend though, so I'm probably spending the next several weeks rsyncing 600gb of files over my friend's residential connection. Luckily, if there's something important I need I can grab it pretty quickly.
The moral of the story:
When installing Windows, always unplug all of your drives except the one you're going to be installing Windows on. If you leave them plugged in, Windows will shit all over them.
I'm so close to dumping Windows, but I need Microsoft Word. I hear the latest version of wine runs Word, so maybe I'll try that, or even a VM. I'm tired of this crap.