I would strongly recommend that you just work on another drive, cloning the working partition, rather than the empty one. It would be much safer all-around. In fact, if you have another drive, you can probably try some of the programs mentioned above to at least copy/restore files you need short-term to it (e.g. your work so far on the anniversary).

If I were you, I wouldn't risk anything that may permanently remove all of my data. I don't know how important that data is for you, but there's always a chance you'll suddenly remember some important document there that did not have a recent back-up.

Just think about it from this angle, a new harddrive will quite commonly cost alot less than the worth of lost data, or the cost of post-abuse restoration.

I've never cloned a drive so it's new territory for me - obviously I'm meant to learn

Info on disk imaging programs (link)... The part of most interest to you now is "Partition Imagers"... HTH

Edited June 22, 200818 yr by dencorso