A story with a happy ending!
- Like a good little boy, I kept the Win XP Pro OS and all program files on my C: Drive.
- And I kept all our data on another drive, our Data drive, the D: Drive.
- And just in case, the D: Drive gets backed up, daily, to an external USB2 HDD.
- My system had not been re-built in 3 years so I decided to do a fresh install.
- The system drives are in removable caddies.
- So, I unplugged the C: Drive and mounted a spare drive in its place.
- I then commenced a fresh install of Win XP Pro.
- I took the option to delete the partition on what I though was the new C: Drive.
- Only it was the partition on our D: Drive, our Data Drive.
Whoops!
- I removed the freshly installed C: Drive and inserted the old C: Drive.
- The system could not recognise or see the D: Drive now with no partition.
- Ouch!
- I downloaded GetDataBack and lo and behold it found everything on the D: Drive without the partition.
- I installed a fresh 1TB HDD and restored all the data (6170 Folders, 1,360,066 Files, 335Gb) from the D: Drive.
- I also purchased a copy of Acronis to replace my ancient back up software which was a bit dodgy over the network.
Next jobs:- Create a clean image of the freshly installed Win XP Pro on the new C: Drive so that in case of a disaster, I don’t have to spend 2 days loading stuff from CDs/DVDs, Download Folders or Internet Sites.
- Read old fashioned DOS style menus much more carefully before selecting “L” to remove partitions!
Cheers
Dennis
PS – In Brisbane, our study was a hot, humid 35° C during the restore!