Format d:

By my reckoning, that's the third scariest thing you can type from the command line. (Second, of course, is format c:, while the scariest of all is fdisk, which, unless you know what you're doing, will indeed f your disk.)

Anyway, I had a bizarre failure around cluster number 13,900 on that logical drive: everything ground to a halt when reaching it. I found no virus or spyware, so I moved off everything I could, dropped to DOS — you remember DOS, don't you? — and reformatted the drive. To my surprise, the reformat turned up no bad sectors, so I have to assume that whatever files were in that cluster were so badly corrupted that nothing this side of Steve Gibson was going to read them.

I lost, by my count, three files, and two were restored from copies elsewhere, so I lost a total of one file and two hours. I'm thinking, though, that it's probably time to start pricing a new drive, maybe even a new machine for the desktop.