[Petaurus]

Hi,
Vista x64 has just de-allocated my three data partitions (on the same hard drive) for no reason, so I am left with a functioning C partition and 186 Gb of partitions that are showing up as free space in disk manager. I ran RMF file recovery to pick up the most important files first, which seems to have worked, but really I would like to get a copy of my old partitions for emergency. When I run the complete format recover, I think there are a few problems. One is that this seems to recover only the file types that were ticked to be searched but not any others. Also in folder view, I can't see any folders. Lastly, I am not sure how long searching 186 Gb should take but the search took upwards of 7 hours (I went to bed after that) before it slowed down, which happened when the progress bar was at about 50%.

Given that I still have a working C partition, would it be worth installing XP on that just to have things working better?