Upgrade from Vista to Windows 7

[AdAstra]

I'm basically stuck in an upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 on my laptop. It basically didn't finish the upgrade. Microsoft, as usual, is worthless when it comes to technical support. I may eventually get it resolved, but I'm not hopeful. I may eventually have to do a clean install or some such similar draconian measure. But, before I go that route, I may want to just end the upgrade. The disk appears to be corrupted. I can go to a c prompt (dos) and do a chkdsk routine. So, if I wanted to recover my files, should I do it now (via the c prompt and a USB drive) or should I do a clean install, get back to a Windows environment (but with files actually deleted) and attempt a recovery then? I suspect now would be the best time, but I wanted your advice before I continued. I am definitely interested in using your recovery software (because I don't think the Microsoft techs will be useful), but don't know when to use it. I just don't want to continue until I hear back from the experts.

[GDH]

Hi,

When thinking in terms of data recovery, it is always best to minimize writing any new data to the disk. The general idea behind this is that you cant make a bad situation worse. Continuing to make changes to the drive may overwrite and destroy data of value which could make recovery in the future more problematic.

The best methodology to employ now, is to take this hard drive and connect it to another computer as a secondary drive. This gives you access from the good computer to scan the drive and see what can be recovered.

If you follow these instructions and watch the video you should be able to quickly determine what can be recovered:

Recover a Formatted Drive with Recover My Files v4