Hi ****. Kinda in a pickle here - a rather large one too. Ok now let's see, I'll try make it as brief as possible...
I originally had a dual-boot with Vista and XP. The larger SATA drive was Vista, but I got annoyed by that so chucked in a smaller older IDE and put XP on that.
So I had: 320gb SATA - Vista, never used the OS but stored files on it mainly
160gb IDE - 2 partitions, main one had XP on it that I used all the time, and then a smaller 20gb one just for extra storage.
Stuck with that configuration for a while, but just recently I decided I'd get rid of the Vista install seeing as I never used it and didn't want to go back, and put XP on it as it was the faster drive.
It went down like this: I went through each drive and got everything I wanted to keep, storing it in one folder on the IDE drive. I uninstalled my games etc so I could fit all the backup stuff there, and then proceeded to format the Vista / SATA drive and install XP on it. That was fine, except for the fact that the main drive decided to be labelled 'D' and the IDE was 'C' and 'E', but I could handle that - it was only until I went back to format the IDE drive after copying the backup stuff back over to the SATA / main drive that I started getting problems.
Now, I didn't think of it at the time, but seeing as I was formatting C drive, this was actually the one that had all the boot configuration stuff on it. So, formatting it meant I could no longer boot into Windows, even after changing boot priorities in the BIOS. After POST I would recieve some kind of error, ranging from an invalid BCD file to a message telling me to go back and choose a proper boot device.
I spent a large amount of time attempting to copy the required boot files onto both the IDE and SATA drives through recovery console and other various methods, but nothing worked. So I resorted to downloading an .iso of a bootable partition utility called G-parted. Now by this time, I wasn't really thinking straight, and after mucking around with the utility a little bit and changing the labels of the SATA to 'Boot' and disabling that for the IDE drive, just as I was about to go and try it, I noticed a copy function and thought this would allow me to copy the contents of my smaller IDE partition onto my SATA drive, so then I could completely format the IDE drive.
Sadly, it wasn't anything to do with copying files, but instead the file system. As soon as I realised this, I cancelled the operation, but the damage was done - the SATA drive was now corrupt. It said I needed to run Chkdsk to fix it, so I went and did that....after a very large amount of corruption errors, I could finally recognise it again, but this time it was only 20gb in size and all my files had been deleted!
I started to freak out, looking for un-delete programs to save my backup. After using a DOS program that displayed files on each hard drive, I found out that my files had not been deleted at all - they were actually still there, but with a zero size! I cannot believe it. They are all there, but 0kb each. My drive has shrunk, and all my files are useless. So I hereby end this mammoth post by asking: how the hell can I get my files back?
I put XP back on the IDE so as to not disturb the files on the SATA drive, and I'm sitting here using IE *shudder* looking at all my files that are so useless now....
I'm dying here, just thinking about everything I have lost is something I can't really cope with...all those save files, custom configs, videos, pr0n and games I had spent ages backing up, gone! Shocked
So I am begging that someone has a solution...otherwise it looks like a grim holiday for me
Thanks ****, I'm posting on a few different forums to see if I can find a solution, so if there's somewhere else you reckon I should go, let me know
