Had a bad crash; couldn’t get past a minidump block that looped me back to startup; couldn’t make a new partition- so, loaded XP Home over XP Pro, hoping it would be kind- and was able to recover most of the old files! However, after a lot of trial-and-error recovery from the underlying layer (it’s like a mask over all the old stuff, some of which came through, some I had to reload) and a few tweaks (driver updates etc.) I now find that System Restore doesn’t work at all- so the next time I crash, it may be the last for this computer- unless any of you has some bright ideas.
I also lost a big folder which I encrypted (dumb) & have tried various tools to recover; no luck so far- @ 1700 pictures are there; just can’t get to them without the key, which is somewhere in limbo.
Any economical way to backup @ 20 gigs? I could divide into @ 4 GB DVDs, but am not sure where to separate (include Windows in startup etc.?)
