Well fabsroman, I am an Idiot....sometimes!
44years old, married, kids....been "Into" computers since you had to build them yourself...I've worked on/in electronics since the late 70's.......
BUT!
sometimes, in my busy life, I forget one of my cardnial rules...
Thou shall not work on critical systems when thou art' tired!
I get working, and push myself a little bit (Allot) too far into the night.....and.... It bites me back for it!
HARD!
WARNING LONG STORY AHEAD!
it was late. I was up W-A-Y past when I should have been in bed. I wanted to get my main system upgraded to XP.....and had backed it up on a secondary hard disk.....and nothing else.
I then wipped the "C:" drive and booted XP from the CD.
When it asked where I wanted to put the xp....I wiped Both drives partitions....I obviously didn't mean to, but I did.
As soon as I did...I realised what I had just done.....but figured that I could just recover the partition..after I had the system up and running. (Foolish mortal that I am!)
After getting the system up, and finally going to bed (2:30am..I have to get up @ 5am!) I thought that I'd be only mildly inconvenanced by this........
WRONG!
I've run everything at this thing...and finally found a program (demo) that I could use & would "See" the deleated partition......But wouldn't recover it..because it was only a demo!
After looking for many more hours, dropping posts all over the net trying to figgure out what I could do, I returned to the demo program...and went on-line and paid the $30 for the full version download...got it..ran it..and it's help file suggested running a "Heavy Scan" in order to make the chance of recovery more likely.....Set it to scan & went to bed (2:30am again!).
This morning I went back to my system to find the scan done, and the "Old" partition showing up in the program's window.
I selected it, hit the "Recover" button, and was greeted with an error window.
It wanted me to deleate the partition table..
I did, reselected the "old" partition again, and again hit the "Recover" button.......It sys it recovered the partition, but it can't verify it...and to reboot and check it...I reboot....XP now "Sees" the drive (It didn't before), but....
{It now says that the drive isn't formated...& that I need to format it!}
Sometimes I don't know why I get out of bed in the morning.
I'm off to go shoot it now.
Tall Shadow