I finally got around to installing Vista build 5270 earlier this evening; my thoughts on the newest build will have to take a back burner until another day due to the fact that somehow Vista re-partitioned my external USB drive…you know, the one with all of my data on it.  All of my Visual Studio projects (though thankfully I have the important one’s in Source Safe on another machine), all of my work related stuff, all of my music (about 6800 tracks)…roughly 120 gigs worth of stuff.

I didn’t even realize it until I was done playing around with Vista; I rebooted back onto my main disc (installed Vista on a separate HDD), tried to navigate to my docs, and promptly got an error.  After recovering from the mini heart attack that ensued I started digging around; fired up disc management and sure enough the disc was showing as “unallocated”, along with “not initialized”, and clicking initialize did nothing to help my cause (the disc simply wouldn’t mount).  Reinstalled drivers, unplugged it half a dozen times, rebooted a few times…nada.  The real panic started to set in at this point.  Thinking it was machine specific (yeah right), I plugged the drive into another machine, and indeed came back with the same results, except this time I was able to successfully initialize the disc, so a slight sigh of relief (I guess).  So I then did some Googling and this tool came up highly recommended, so I downloaded the trial version and am currently scanning the drive with it, unfortunately it’s reporting 9 hours to go at this point, and after 6% it’s reporting <1000 files found.  I’m absolutely mortified…and yes, I don’t have a backup for a lot of the stuff (shame on me).

The previous build I installed obviously did not do this, and I’m 98% sure I followed the same steps.  At no point did I select the external drive for anything during the install process; I chose only to reformat the internal drive I was installing Vista on.  Not pointing fingers at anyone, but this is a really shitty situation to be in right now.  Is there something simple I’m overlooking to get my data back?  The drive wasn’t reformatted; only the partition info was deleted.  I’m not a Windows admin guru, so if anyone has any other tips please help a brotha out…I’m desperate.

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