My Nightmare Day

Are you using Windows XP or Vista? Which one is better for you?

For the past 13 months, I'm using Windows Vista Business Edition for my notebook. I feel Windows Vista is a more stable version and 'bug-less' of Windows operation system if compare to Windows XP. I did not get any 'blue screen' error and those annoying errors I got in Windows XP. And the graphics in Vista is a lot improve and better user experience.

Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, slashing it's big price now.

However, I understand why there is so many people complaint about Windows Vista, because it also has many other problems. For me with Vista running, I unable to install or run certain non-compatible applications, such as Any Password, Maple Story, especially older version of software, such as Trend Micro OfficeScan. Apart from that, the most users concern is speed. Basically Vista also eating up a lot of memory, even after tuning and tweaking. I've 2 GB of RAM for my notebook. Once booted up without running any application, it has already taken about 50% of the RAM. That's quite bad. Imagine it could be even worse for those non-IT literate.

Anyway, I prefer to have a faster operating system to perform tonnes of daily works, while leaving my MSN, YM, Skype, Winamp, Thunderbird, Microsoft Office Words, Excels and Firefox with 10 tabs open. So I've finally formatted my notebook hard disk on yesterday, for the 1st time after 13 months. It's proud to say that, as normally people would format the hard disk within 13 months, right?

Before format, I backup all my important personal and working data into a external USB hard drive. During format, I partitioned my hard disk into 30GB for C drive and 50GB for D drive, by selecting C as the primary partition for system files. After formatted, I plug-in the external USB hard drive trying to restore my important data in the first place. However, when I open up C drive, it was empty! I'm not sure why, the system files have been installed to D drive instead. I guess I'm just lazy to re-partition them using a paid software (as I don't have one, and have to find crack), I re-formatted my notebook again.

Sample of formatting hard disk to Windows XP Professional

Here's the unfortunate decision for me. When it came to the screen where allow me to repartition my hard disk tables, I thought I'm so expert and I just closed my eyes and removed all partitions within a second. Yes, I stupidly did it. Congratulate me. What's wrong with it? I guess you've knew about it, I forgot to remove my USB hard disk, and I accidentally deleted it's partition as well. That's a good news! I lost all my backup important data. So how I'm going to restore my backup data later?

I was having a little bit panic, while grabbing a hope that the USB hard disk partition can be restore using 3rd party software, be it paid or free. I spent about 2 hours to look for an solution, while asking my colleagues around for any experience on it. Unfortunately, most of them still virgins, who did not do such stupid thing before, like me. And another unfortunately, I unable to find a free software that helps, all the paid software sucks, as they able to find my data, but it unable to extract my data out. Hehe, because I'm using a demo version of paid software.

That doesn't bother me much, I still keep looking around and around with another helpful colleague, Ng. To be in details, I'm looking keywords such as "recover lost partition", "recover deleted partition" in Google. Suddenly I saw a IT brilliant colleague, Arthur pass by. Then I asked him what is his opinion. He immediately asked me a few technical questions, and find out the exact keyword that actually I need to key in. The actual keyword he gave me was, "recover deleted partition table". Immediately he gave me the software name and ask me to try it.

Within half an hour, the USB hard disk partition table is restored, 100% of the backup data is recovered as well. What a brilliant software! Thanks TestDisk!

Recovering lost partitions using TestDisk, be it accidently or purposely.

I guess I learned some great lessons from this incident.
(1) Never do something without 'NOT' using the brain, even it is familiarize.
(2) Try to understand in depth the root of issue/problem well, step by step. You have to ask yourself many questions in order to expertise on this. I think many books written about this, they are just damn right.
(3)When you want to search Google and look for solution, please use the right keyword to look for the right URL or answer you want, just like my case.

From the lessons I learned, I would say Arthur is a smart guy. Yes, he is really smart, unfortunately he hasn't utilize his smart brain to make big money. This is bad, at least for me.