Since we returned from our holidays, I and my girlfriend are considering moving together after a 2.5 years' relationship. That would mean new furniture for the living room of her apartment and a new desk for me. Being a hi-tech guy as far as I can remember me, I decided to go for home cinema equipment as well. So, I have been reading in dozens of forums and sites the last week about receivers, amplifiers, speakers and so on. I recently visited a good friend of mine's house where he has installed a HTPC, a Home Theatre PC that is. I was totally sold for that and began searching for the latest computer stuff all at the same time! However, having the possibility to use things from the desktop I already work with, I decided to disassemble my big desktop computer (see the photos in my working environment), in order to move it easier to her flat and also to make any necessary modifications. However, we were progressing a bit slow and since I didn't have a good computer to work with (my laptop is rather a small one) we agreed to postpone the big move. Back at my place, I was reinstalling everything in the big Mozart case of my desktop when it hit me: "hey, since I have cleaned up all the mess in the case and reorganized all the cables and stuff, why don't I format the hard disk?". Excellent idea...

Of course it wasn't the first time I formatted a hard disk. It wasn't either the first time I formatted a Vista-installed hard disk. However, it was the first time I formatted a hard disk where both Vista and Linux were present. And that did the trick.

You see, when you install Linux, you have to format a separate partition in your hard drive in order to have your linux edition installed (I had installed Ubuntu 8.04) in the first place. That particular partition isn't visible in other Operating Systems, like Vista. Since I wanted to format my entire hard drive, I had to delete partitions, format the whole drive, write new partitions and format them using only NTFS system. Yeah, yeah, I know, I should have made a backup first. I wasn't born yesterday, I obviously know what I am doing. Or not?

Thing is I use 2 hard disks. My main hard disk (Western Digital Raptor 150GB) had Vista and Linux dual boot installations along with some applications installed. No documents, no databases, nothing. All my emails, address books, settings, important files, documents, personal photos/videos and databases were seated safely in the second big disk (a 500GB Western Digital) in 3 separate partitions. Ok, hard disk formatted, main partition created, partition formatted as NTFS. I am booting up with Vista CD, installing Vista Ultimate 64-bit and the Vista logo sign welcomes me. Aaaaah, a nice clean system. Let's reinstall the necessary applications and link them with the files in the second disk. Accessing "My Computer" and double-clicking on the partition labeled "User Fil..."...!! Oh my! WHERE IS THAT PARTITION???

I could hear my eyes popping out of my face! The reason is obvious. All my emails and poker stuff were right in that partition along with my websites' files. It was top priority by then to rescue all that data. I began searching "undelete" programs, "restore partition" applications and digging in google to find any tiny piece of useful information. I ended up installing about 5 different "undelete" and "restoring" applications and running some excessive scans to my hard disk. The vast majority of those programs were founding some files but without the proper names or without the extensions, making it difficult to understand which is which. Only 2 applications were able to show me my hard disk as it had been. Sort of.

Anyway, point was that I could restore about 50% of my data, including emails and a couple of my poker databases. I still wasn't satisfied. My computer experience dating back to 1985 let me to believe that I could do something more. I wasn't wrong. It was eventually a FREE program that did the work.

The program is called TestDisk. Although it's fairly easy and straight forward to use, it is in DOS environment so that fact could potentially pose a difficulty for some. Being accustomed to CGA monitors back in the 80's and running DOS-based applications, I had the partition back and running in no time. The application is very small, very efficient and does what it promises without any hassles, if you know what you are doing, since you are altering the hard disk structure. Besides, that's exactly what happens when you delete a partition, you don't actually delete the data. That's what I was trying to figure out, how to make that partition readable again, not to "rescue" my data, since it was actually still there! Now, if I had formatted that partition, it would have been a different story.

So, here I am with a fresh system, better cooled case (I did some nice work with the cables compared to how it looked like) and a Raptor fully dedicated to the operating system.

If you happen to have contacted me during last week, please be patient as there are quite a few emails waiting to be answered. And in the rare case you don't hear of me in the forthcoming days, by any means contact me again, most probably your email has lost its way among my hard disks' partitions!