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Stop and think before you click OK!

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This is a cautionary tale with, hopefully, a happy ending.

The other day a friends laptop failed to boot after installing some updates. Not an unusual tale but, due to failing to spot the clues, we ran the restore of the boot drive using the system restore partition. Unfortunately this wiped out the data that was there. The clue I should have spotted? The fact that it was trying to boot from the D: drive. Somehow the 100MB boot partition had been marked as active and had moved the C: drive to D: causing the boot failure.

Now that the data we thought was safe on the D: drive was gone how could we get it back? The non-existent backup did not help so I turned to NTFS recovery software. The first application turned out to be a dud - it ran for 36 hours before I gave up on it. In the end I used a program called ZAR 9. It was able to scan the disk and present a list of restorable files in under an hour. Not all the files are good - reformatting and dumping a system image will cause some damage but most of the files appear to have been recovered.

So if you stuff up as badly as I did then it (http://www.z-a-recovery.com) may save your friendship as well. Its not free but its not expensive either.

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