Multiple OS help, Vista lost

[Traxie]

Hmm where should i start.....I tried to install xp onto my already vista pc earlier today to play some games not supported by vista anymore..after encountering a few problems i.e. partions etc i finally managed to install xp and get my wish of the old games. trouble is i could not boot back into vista. It gets worse. I tried to use the vista repair tool but it failed to find any OS on my pc so i decided to make a fresh install of vista as it told me i would get my old vista files and settings in a folder. Is there any possible way of using this folder to put my vista install back into its old state? Im not that techy and to lose all my mail and the countless things i cant even remember back manually from this folder seems an impossible and hugely time consuming task. Can anyone pls help?

 

[mrturtle]

Lose all your mail? Are you using windows live messenger/GMail or simmilar web based service, or an actual software based application? If you are using a web based services such as messenger or G-mail it will stil be in your inbox when you logon your account on the site, software however would be a different matter as it would probably be stored on your machine, but that could depend on what particular mail client you were using as some store back ups remotely.

You !!MUST!! back up your important files ect. before carrying out any further steps or else you risk loosing them. Or in this case you should have backed up any files before you began. It never hurts to get into the habbit of performing at least semi-regular backups, or even better weekly or monthly backups, hell if you're as paranoid as me you would back up any critical material as soon as you finished uploading from your camera/writing the last paragraph etc.

"so i decided to make a fresh install of vista as it told me i would get my old vista files and settings in a folder. Is there any possible way of using this folder to put my vista install back into its old state?"

You decided to make a fresh install of vista? As in no more XP? just the one new install of vista on a newly formatted drive? Or can you still boot into XP? Can you find any old system restore points? Can you find the folder that the install made of your old files and settings?

What worries me is that you said "I tried to use the vista repair tool but it failed to find any OS", indicating that the install may not have even realised that you had a previous version of vista, therefore how would it realise that it needed to back up or copy any files?

If you think that there may be remanents of the OS it may be worth booting from a live linux cd just in case it picks up the OS. Go to http://www.ubuntu.com/, download the iso image burn that to disk as an ISO image (it must be burned as an iso image or else it won't work), put in the DVD drive, restart the machine, in the BIOS (that balck screen with the white writing when you turn on your computer) setting the boot priority to your DVD drive, the PC should the boot into ubuntu linux, click on the try without installing button (it might have to be reached through the arrow keys), then once the Ubuntu OS has loaded if the vista OS you want to rescue data from is present it will be present under the places tab, if not then as long as you didnt insatll there should be no harm done, and you can move onto a different solution.

The easiest different solution would be to go to a proffesional data recovery comapny, who will use specialist software to get data from you hard drive (some data can still be recovered from hard drives that have been reformatted more that 7 times), they are expensive but the only way to go if you have important data that you need.

There are comerial and open source software alternatives (to the step mentioned above) that you can use to recover data, however having never used any before myself I can't recommed any as I do not know how effective they might be for you, There may even be some on the downloads section of this site.