Windows Vista and Vital Data

Some terrible experience with Windows Vista Home Basic Edition

I have been clicking away some pics and shooting small videos with my Sony Digicam and Nokia 6270. Those moments in life are very precious. I had not taken care of them for a long time, had simply kept accumulating them in my pc. After I bought my Laptop (one of the reasons to buy it) I thought I can take care of the virtual real estate. I transfered most of the things on to my Laptop, installed picasa and was happy adding more to them.

I always wanted to install and work on Linux on the Laptop. I also did not want to disturb the partitions on the HDD of Laptop. I decided to try and boot from a USB External HDD with Linux. So bought a 40GB USB HDD for Rs 2700 /-.

I only had the very old Fedora Core 1 installation CDs for installing Linux. The installer did not detect the USB HDD. Desperate to install Linux, I decided to load it on the HDD.

I booted with Windows Vista moved all my vital data from the D Drive to C, deleted the partition and created a 40 GB and a 80 GB partition. I tried to format the 80 GB partition but Windows Vista Home Basic returned error saying it "could not complete the task". I continued with my Linux installation and everything worked well. Now I had both Linux and Windows Vista on my HDD.

I booted Windows Vista, tried to partition the 80 GB partition again. This time I got it right and a new Volume got created with a quick format. I moved all my vital data to the new 80GB partition, opened picasa and made sure everything was in place. But after a reboot I noticed Vista was not displaying D Drive. All my data was gone!!!! Did I do something wrong? I checked that the partition was intact but had no drive letter assigned. I tried assigning drive letter from the GUI and through the diskpart command line application, but was not successful. I was cursing myself for the whole thing that happened and Windows Vista for the kind of Disk Management.

I checked with some computer shops for Data recovery. They were hinting that it would cost more than a Rs 1000 /-. I checked for Data recovery tools and found so many of them. All were priced more than 40$, but they had demo versions with minimal features like displaying the contents that could be recovered. I tried with two of them. The first one did not work at all, but the second one showed the contents all intact. It also had a viewer which would open all the files. I could play all my music and see all my videos, but had to buy the complete license to recover all of them.

I decided to try something with Linux and ntfs mounting stuff.

On Fedora Core 6 Installation I could select the USB HDD and successfully installed FC6. The trick here is that the boot loader is still required to be on the HDD. I got the ntfs-3g and pre-compiled ntfs supported kernel installed on the USB HDD from the yum install. I connected my USB HDD, booted with the new kernel and got the 80GB partition mounted on Linux. I copied all my a data to the USB HDD and also wrote them onto the DVD. All my data is safe now.

For any assistance on how to do this on Linux add them in your comments

Cheers to Linux
Cheers to the Open Source world
"In a world without fences and walls who needs gates and windows"