Reinstalling XP Pro

[S'land]

My laptop crashed this morning, well would not start up. It said that the system could not find one of the .exe files and that I should open with the XP installation disc and repair the programme. I tried this, but it then said that there was no data and that I should reinstall XP from scratch. this I have done, but when checked in the system it seems to have held over parts of the old programmes. There is also about 8Gb of disc space missing.

As the data on my laptop was also around 8Gb, does this mean that I can get it back somehow? if it does then it would save me a lot of work.

In the past when I have reinstalled operating systems it formatted the disc and overwrote everything.

[tony draper]

Has it hung on to the old restore points? you could see if it will do a system restore.

[S'land]

Mr D, thanks I tried to do a restore, but it would not work.

[tony draper]

To bad, System Restore is the best thing microsoft ever came up with, in truth I dunno owt about lappies except I don't like em,gimmee a large tin box one can get one's hands into to rip out hard disks and such.
:uhoh:

[Saab Dastard]

What does "missing" mean?

When you did the re-install, did you delete the existing partitions or install over the existing installation?

What size is the hard disk? What proportion is the 8GB? It is pretty normal for the partitions on a disk to add up to less than the theoretical maximum. Also, there may be a hidden recovery partition.

If you want to maximise the chances of recovering your data, you should stop right now and buy a replacment hard disk and an external USB HD caddy.

Take out the existing HD, put in the new, install XP, put the old disk in the USB caddy and try an recover your data.

SD

[S'land]

Sorry, I gave a bad explanation.

My hard disc id 60Gb. Before the crash, witn all programmes installed and with saved data there was about 19,5 Gb of free space.

After reinstalling there is only 14,3Gb. This is with not all of the programmes installed and before any backed up data is installed, hence the 'missing' 8Gb.

[Saab Dastard]

From what you say it sounds like you have done a parallel installation, alongside the existing windows, especially as you have mentioned that some of the old programs are still there.

Although it seems to me that you are "missing" 5 GB, not 8 (difference between 19 and 14 GB free space), which could be accounted for by the 2nd copy of Windows (though it's a bit high for that, still).

Assuming that you haven't overwritten anything (yet), there's a reasonably good chance of recovering data, but it depends on what actually caused the failure in the first place.

Can you confirm that you left the existing partitions intact when you re-installed windows?

When you now run windows, what can you see in explorer?

Where did you have your data? If it was in My Documents, there's a good chance it is still there - although under your "old" My Documents".

Assuming you have admin rights, open up C: \Documents and Settings - do you now see more than one folder for each username, one with perhaps the PC name attached?

That's the most likely scenario if you have done a re-install over / alongside the old Windows.

Frankly, I would do a complete re-partition and re-install at this point - after recovering and backing up your data, of course!

SD

[S'land]

Thanks Saab Dastard, it was a parallel installation. Unfortunately the only data that could be salvaged was stuff that I already had backed up. Anything done last week was lost.

Have now reinstalled XP, just have to install all of the programmes.

Thanks for your help.

Richard