HandyRecovery

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Today I registered Handy Recovery 2.0. Why?

Here is my "horror" story:

I was copying some drivers to my USB drive, to reinstall the PC I was working with. After copying all the drivers, I inserted the Windows XP cd, the floppy with the unattended settings and rebooted the computer. I completely forgot to unplug the USB drive.

What happened? During the install, XP deleted all partitions found on the computer... INCLUDING THE ONE ON THE USB DRIVE!!!!!

When I was ready to copy the drivers files that I assumed where still on the USB drive, the drive was EMPTY and XP reported its format as RAW. Searching the web I found Handy Recovery, and thank God, it was a saver. It identified the drive's lost partition, and even when it was still "analyzing" the USB data I FINALLY saw my files again! The only drawback the demo has is that it only allows 1 file to be recovered daily (demo works for 30 days), so you better register it if you want to recover more than that.

Well, I registered and got all my files back! Now... the 2nd part of the "nightmare"

Ok, Handy Recovery rescued my files to the C:\Recovered Files folder, now it was only a matter of copying the files back to the usb drive.... WRONG!!!

Since XP recognized the drive as RAW format, it did not allow to write to it. All attempts to re-format the thing were futile, since XP (and DOS FORMAT) reported something like: "Cannot obtain sector size... aborting". Now what!!!!

I figured that since XP textmode install identified and erased the partition info on the USB, maybe I needed to re-establish the partition information on the USB drive with a partition utility. Luckily, Handy Recovery already identified the lost partition as being FAT16 type. So I ventured to FDISK, but found it did not detect the USB drive from the MSDOS prompt. So, I went to Disk Administrator (Right click on My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management). There I simply reformatted the "Removable" drive and activated its partition as FAT (e.g. FAT16).

Now the drive acted "alive" again and I could copy my files. I thought that posting this here could help a lot of people that could encounter a similar situation.

Lessons learned:

• Never leave a USB drive plugged in if you are going to reboot and NOT going to boot from the USB drive
  
• Always make a backup of your files (even for USB drives). CDRs are really cheap these days.
  
• Never assume that your storage medium is infalible!