Need helps for switching from Service Pack 1 to Service Pack 2

Hello AC Wing!

Do not hurry. The best recovery software what I ever seen is GetDataBack. You can study and try one out for instance here . Or google to find appropriate mirror for downloading. It's shareware and it has two separate versions for NTFS and FAT.

UFS explorer (shareware as well) would be suggested as quite good.

It's possible to estimate capabilities of these packages for free then it will up to you whether or not to buy ones.

Hope it helps.

caramba

In a case like this, buy a new hard drive and restore to that. Restoring to the old drive dumps your data.

Then buy one of those $25 external USB cases and recover your data to each program you install later from the old drive that you install in that USA external drive case.

You probably had some adware or rootkit that was interfering and crashing the system.

an adware as well as antivirus as well as a firewall are de rigeur these days

I had a very similar problem several weeks ago, and a piece of adware was to blame. How did it get past the Norton 360? Yeah, Norton, how did that happen?

I thought that I lost everything, but I do keep two (2) current PC's and one (1) laptop all as mirrors of each other, to an extent. Paranoia? I think YES! All of my data files were fine-just had to find them!

I had to remove certain keys from the registry, and reload software. I finally snagged the culprit and removed it from the machine. That is the problem with partitioned hard drives, as the "D" is the backup for "C" and so what if the virus/adware removal software cleaned it repeatedly from the "C" drive-it kept a home on the "D" drive where it could restore itself to the "C" drive, seemingly at will.

I disabled the restore function of the "D" drive, spent a good three (3) days fixing the machine, and continued to reload software as days went by and I found something else that was not working. By far, the worst software to restore was all of my AutoDesk applications.

And guess what the adware was promoting? A spyware solution, no less.

Best Regards,

Ing. Robert Forbus

How did it get past the Norton 360?

Weird huh? Yeper I help some buddies maintain their pooters, they had always insisted to use Norton but after experiencing several events and noticing I hadn't had problems I have replaced Norton with Zonealarm and the reoccurring events have been eliminated. I do miss the work though...

You can say that again! I had many issues with spyware and adware when I had Norton many years ago with my XP Home version. The last 3 years, I have been using XP Pro SP2 OS with McAfee Total Protection and have not had a glitch as glitches go. McAfee has very good Tech Support when needed.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT!

Mr. HandyMan

Yeper but Mcafee isn't much better than Norton you've been fortunate or circumspect regarding sites you surf staying out of the sights of predator. Keep ZoneAlarm in mind

Sorry to hear about your mis-fortune.

Usually, when you use a program such as Microsoft Outlook, it is getting the email from a Server and you have options for keeping the email on the server for x number of days or not. Depending upon how you had this set up, you may be able to retrieve some of your old emails with the new setup. If your Internet Service Provider provides a website to go to to check your email, you should see what is on the server.

For refernce,

Outlook file type is *.pst (this would include contacts)

Outlook personal address book is *.pab

Favorites are stored as folders/files in:

C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Favorites

IE does allow you to export your favorites to a file. I frequently do export mine and back it up, other browsers should have similar functions.

Hope this helps you recover some of your information.

Don, that's true. A good way to keep all of the data safe is to make sure that Archive folders are set up in Outlook so one may keep a current copy of all e-mails, addresses, and calendar items and these are stored as a .pst file.

I did not learn to archive all of my Outlook folders by habit! Rather, I learned to do this when I went over the server data limit my employer imposes. Once I did that, I did the same thing at home with my personal machines.

My private ISP does not use Outlook servers-they are the common Pop3 setup. Hence I save and maintain an archive of the various Outlook folders.

Once a week I do backup the .pst file from my work computer and my main home computer just in case. As far as IE shortcut archives are concerned, I have a redundancy with my personal PC's that protects me. Neverthelss, USB flash drives are wonderful things!

Best Regards,

Ing. Robert Forbus

Cutting all these short, I wonder if anyone in CR4 would be kind enough to help telling me that if there are ways I could recover my email addresses,

All messages you have sent are stored on the server retrieve from it or get a copy of all your activity from your ISP

the contacts stored, my favourite site addresses and other useful information.

You shouldve backed this stuff up before but who does. There are data retrievers but most do not provide handy or adequate search tools and the data isn't usually complete or useable. Check CNET or download.com

I have not had any of your problems with the upgrades and I have a mixed batch of computer OS XP, XP pro, Vista ultimate, and one windows 98.

I have lost a couple hard drive due to mechanical failures, so I can sympathize with you. I (NOW) have back up to an external computer (using a backup program) and I also manually backup my documents and drawings every few days.

I use Earthlink for my email and they keep a database of my addresses and I can use it from any computer that I have access to. And I backup the addresses in excel.

You can recover most of your information using recovery software. But next time it maybe a hardware failure and recovery is very difficult. There are companies that as a arm and a leg that can possibly recover your lost information.

Dear all,

Most of your inputs are helpful. My greatest loses were the addresses, sites and email. I have all my data files backed up.

I'll try your suggestions and thanks a lot for your inputs. Please keep post when you have more to tell.

Cheers,

AC Wing.

Oh, one more help request, anyone know how to remove hard disc partition without affect the rest on the same hard disc? I try once before, but the hard disc ended up in junkyard! If you have a good experience and reliable software, it would really help!

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,

AC Wing.

Buy a new HD and back up to it or create what you want on the new drive then, well you know the rest of the story...

If you have an Intel processor you get 3 free trouble calls, use one and have them help you fix their stuff online.

If this partition is FAT I used to rely on old good fdisk. More safely to connect your disk as slave to another PC and make all what you need through standard Administrative procedures of WinXP/2k. You can treat as well this or this one.

I didn't mentioned Linux here --- there is a lot of ways how reconfigure your hdd.

regards, caramba

Its too late now. Should have back them up before running recovery.

Try to search for *.pst files. I don't think its still there. If you could still find it, your Favorite will be in the same user folder. Make sure you set Explorer to should protected and hidden system files.

You are right and thanks a lot.

Cheers,

AC Wing.