Stefan Mileschin

A private research university in metropolitan Atlanta, Emory University stuffed up a Windows 7 roll-out in a tragedy of biblical proportions.

Everyone knows that when you install a new operating system, that message comes up and asks you if you want to reformat you old hard-drive. It seems that Emory University, which has proudly been running Windows XP since the university was founded in 1836, really did not have a clue when it came to these “new fangled” operating systems.

During the roll out a Windows 7 deployment image was accidently sent to all Windows machines, including laptops, desktops, and even servers.

This image started with a repartition/reformat set of tasks. As soon as the accident was discovered, the SCCM server was powered off – however, by that time, the SCCM server itself had been repartitioned and reformatted.

The fallout was quite dramatic, but could have been worse. The deployed image included a number of key applications such as Office, other such as Visio and Project required manual installation which meant that not everything was over written.

According to WinBeta, IT technicians worked through the night to restore "mission critical" computers to help speed up the process of getting others systems back up and running.

All told, the clean-up took a couple of days from start to finish, although there is still some work to be done to get all system fully operational again. It is not clear how much of everything was backed up as different sources say different things.

http://news.techeye.net/business/uni...ter-by-mistake