Data recovery
I just realized that I didn’t post a conclusion to my fun with my re-partitioned USB hard drive. So here it is…
I ended up grabbing a software package to undelete after a reformat and other accidents. I tried a couple of them and went back to something I had used in the past, Active Undelete .
It worked, but not very easily and not completly. I was able to see my files, but when I attempted to recover the main folders, it didn’t work. So I tried individual files. Hey, that worked, but what a pain. So I came to a realization that it worked on some folders and not others.
I was able to recover all my pictures and other important files, but not any of my video files (I think it was a file size issue). I was using this drive as my video capture drive when I transfered video from my digital camcorder. So I lost all of that, plus all the final video (luckily I have them on DVD) after editing, etc.
But after two days of worrying and making sure I got all the data off, I finally felt comfortable with what I got.
So as a summary, here’s the tips I have to prevent this in the future:
- Don’t ever delete a partition when you might need it.
- Always have a backup… even of the drive that is too big for backups (this one was 230GB), find a way.
- Always unplug USB devices when reinstalling XP.
- Don’t be stupid