Quote:
Originally Posted by ldegeneve
Thanks so much for the help (and sympathy) guys :)
Here's my (tentative) plan so far, tell me if it'll work. There was another drive on the computer. I removed the main drive for now, and will install a fresh copy of XP on the secondary drive. When that's done I'll put the drive with all the important stuff back in and try to recover the data then.
Is that more or less ok?
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That's odd, I didn't see anywhere in your plans for the formal beating of your brother silly for his dastardly act.
On the gloomier side though, data recovery once that partition has been reformatted will be iffy and not 100%.
To give you an example of what reformatting does, take any large metropolis like Los Angeles. Take all of your family heirlooms and scatter them to the farthest reaches of that city. No problem finding everything because every building in LA has an address so you can list and locate everything right?
Reformatting is like burning that list. The heirlooms are still safe however you can't find them without knowing the location of each item (or file in this case).
Every time you write data to that reformatted hard drive it's like cleaning out a building and putting new stuff in it. If that building that is being cleaned out contains some of your heirlooms, too bad, it's history.
This is a good time to also urge computer users to also defrag your hard drive as well. This will put all of your heirlooms in one district of LA instead of every district in LA. Like your automobile, your hard drive's pick up arm has to travel all over LA to find the heirlooms instead of looking only in one place. Saves a lot of wear and tear.
Also a good time to urge computer users to...BACK UP YOUR DATA preferrably on an external hard drive rather than on the same drive as your operating system.
Good luck, and post the beatings on youtube so we can all rate it
