System Restore Works

A few days ago, I told my new home system to safely remove the flash drive from the USB port I plugged it into, but instead chose the controller for the two DVD drives in the system. uh oh. Went to play Railroads!, no cd drive found, rebooted the system, only the two internal hard drives found, no optical drives. Argh. Dug through the carry-all bag that came with the system and found the driver cd. Popped it in, went to device manager and tried to update the controller's driver. Unable to read from the drive! Rebooted into system setup and changed the boot order to the first DVD drive, put in the XP Media Edition restore disk I got from the manufacturer, system booted fine from the drive. So the drive can be read, windows just forgot how to talk to it. I was this close to re-partitioning the drive, re-formatting the partitions, and re-installing the operating system when I finally remembered, system restore. Took the bootable disk out of the first DVD drive and went back into windows, launched the system restore tool and picked a checkpoint from the week before. Rebooted the system again, and my drives all appeared! Launched Railroads! just fine, launched another game from the other drive, whew! Must stop scaring myself and just remember to use the tools that I have.