Restore Hard Drives without reformatting.

[dlite922]

// go to "My Question" below to skip back story and rant.


Windows 7 is still Microsoft ****.

Problem:
Windows 7 no longer recognizes some partitions on different disk that were untouched after recognizing them just fine after the first install but before I committed the ultimate sin: Restore to 2 Days ago.

Story:
I have 4 drives in my rebuild computer (upgraded MB,RAM,CPU and yes OS to Win 7), the 4th drive is a new solid-state drive where the OS goes.

Drive 2: OLD OS, 1 partition
Drive 3: Data, 2 partitions
Drive 4: Data, 1 partition

After a fresh install I could see everything just fine (NTFS formatted). So Happily I install all my drivers + programs. Until 2 days later I put the computer to sleep and everything shuts off (screen, keyboard, mouse). It has done this in the past so i thought it was a fault in the power supply (since I didn't change it, it's fairly new).

TURNS OUT!! IT was ****** INstalling Windows updates (which I thought I turned off)!! GAAAAHHH!!! So when I try to reboot, it kept freezing before the login page saying "configuring Windows Update 0%, please wait", hard drive light would blink at a constant (once every second). So obviously it was faulting somewhere.

My Biggest Mistake:
1. I restarted into safe mode and restored to just after I had installed everything, to see how well it worked since XP. Answer: It's still ****.
2. Upon restore, I get .dll errors for power management ( I had changed the settings since then) don't know why it wouldn't "restore" the settings!! the Network card completely stopped. It would not get IP or release or do anything. Even after re-installing the driver.
3. SO, I said OK, I planned for this, I don't have any data, I'll re-install everything and chalk it up to lesson learned. My data is still safe on my other hard drives.

I Re-installed everything on the solid state OS drive and everything worked fine.I go to access some of my partition and windows and BAM!! Windows does not recognize the file system. Asks me to format the drive.

my immediate thoughts:
FUUHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Note: These data drives were NOT monitored by System Restore. Nor were they being updated by Windows Update obviously. so WHY!!!!!!!!




Issue: Random partitions spread out on a few disks are no longer recognizable by Windows 7.

My Question:

Is there away to make windows re-recognize the drives without using a data recovery tool? I know how to recover the data BUT it gets so dis-organized and it will take me a month to put back into folders. Very very messy.

Is there a program to fix this issue with the drives?

Help me, because I want to drag every Win 7 developer out to the street and .....do bad things :)

Thanks guys,


Dan

[Bishop Manu]

boot from a live cd (linux ),if the drives r ok move your data to the win recognised disks .boot from hdd windows and format the faulty disks .

[ryno du preez]

IN what format is the drives partitioned? . You can try the linux live disk like Ubuntu to see if you can copy you data away, or if you have a exstra pc try to do a hdd transplant to recver that way, If all fails recovery software will be your only friend.

Ps. you can mark this as lesson learned as well ( Always backup all data even if it is a exstra hdd.)