Quote:
| Originally Posted by uwila Assuming you only have one partition on the hard drive (only C: and no second 'disc' in Windows) then a reinstall usually does result in total loss of data. |
There is no usually about it. The install routine does what you tell it to do. You just need to to know what to tell it to do. A repair install overwrites only files that shipped with Windows or were created at install time and leaves the vast majority of applications intact. Accepting defaults and not knowing what the various options mean may well wipe the disk though. Sorry if I have not worded that particularly well.
Quote:
|
However, not all is lost. I have a little Sony box which takes a lap-top hard drive and turns it into an external USB drive (I paid £10 for it). So it may well be possible to remove the drive and use it connected to another PC in order to save the useful data.
|
There is the additional layer of the USB interface in the external enclosure which could interfere with access to the disk, but the theory is sound enough. I have a little connector for connecting laptop disks direct to the IDE bus in a PC dedicated to data recovery - I seem to have to do a lot of this sort thing these days.