ldegeneve

...and now all my data seems lost, or at least unaccessible. :(

I inserted my Windows XP CD to see what I could do, but where my previous XP installation should have been it only says "Unpartitioned space." How can I still boot to XP? Should I re-install XP on it (which partition?) or will I lose all my data? What can I do?

Thanks in advance...

simpswr

and welcome to the Forum

The less you use the Hard Drive the better you chances are of recovering data. To install ME ( pardon the lanugage ) he would have had to format the drive . . which will complicate data retreival.

I would take the drive out of the case, temproarily attach it as a slave to a working pc and run data retreival tools.

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Rich


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ldegeneve

oi...it's just horrible what he did...(props for the "pardon the language" bit that made me laugh in these dire times)

Unfortunately I only have laptops around the house. I was wondering if I could use UBCD4win to retrieve the data (the computer in question has another HD on it I could possibly use, or flash drives (?))...

dai

wait for eneles to come onto the thread
http://partedmagic.com/index.html

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Rob 1

I just want you to know that I feel your pain, and if you need some help beating your brother senseless, just let me know.



But I second the idea of not doing anything else until you have a very solid plan in place for data retrieval.

If you decide to add this drive to another system to retrieve the data, do not forget to set the BIOS to boot from the main system drive first.

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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?

simpswr

Should work . .

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Rich


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Rob 1

I personally think that's the very best way of doing it.

Just don't forget to reset the boot order when you add the old drive back in.

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Deleted090308

Hi,
I agree - installing XP on the second drive seems to be the best solution (easy and cheap).
Remember not to format that drive during installation if there are files you don't want to lose.
And - the "messed-up-drive" should be disconnected while installing XP.

When XP is installed:
Post a screenshot of Disk management with both HDDs connected.

How to post a screenshot.

craigwatanabe

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

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Deleted090308

I have to disagree.
Since the space where XP used to be installed is marked "Unpartitioned space", the data should be untouched. Where ME has been installed is another question...

ldegeneve

Again, thanks so much for the input guys...

I was told this on another forum...

XP is installing on the second disk as I'm typing this...I hope it's not all in vain...