2010-11-16 08:56:43

Added some work for myself. Did you know that when Windows 7 installs, it creates an extra 100 MB partition before its own? I thought: fair enough, unix-style — put the NTLoader and its config files there. However, that bastard also writes additional data there, like a partition table. I decided to nuke that Windows 7 and install a normal Windows in its place. Obviously I planned to format only the system disk and leave the rest untouched. The installer refused to format it, so I used Acronis — and in the process wiped that 100 MB appendix as well. After booting into the freshly installed Windows, my largest logical drive showed up as unformatted and the wrong size (there were many partitions in total — 7 [yes, I’m a maniac] — only the last one disappeared, which also happened to be the largest). And that’s where the working databases were (because they’re big). Thank you to the authors of GetDataBack — it correctly identified both the partition and the data on it, whereas Acronis had stopped launching and couldn’t see anything, and R-Studio took four times as long to scan and found nothing. Slowly recovering, swearing profusely, and recalling the epic text “Real Men Work on Windows.”