At the risk of dating myself (“I’m 39, I’m not old”), I’ve been installing operating systems for a long time. I’ve been installing, re-installing, scripting installing, etc. Windows since 3.11 and I know what I’m doing. Er, at least I thought I knew what I was doing. What I didn’t realize is that Microsoft had changed some of the rules. But before that, let’s cover some background.

If you frequently re-install your OS, you have probably come up with a few shortcuts and customizations that help you when you go back and do it again, and again, and again… For Windows XP, I always create a C: partition for the OS and applications, and a D: partition for all my data files, downloads, etc. By segregating OS from data, I can re-install XP at my leisure with no risk to my data. To keep my data on the D: partition, I use TweakUI to redirect My Documents, Desktop, Favorites, My Pictures, My Music, etc. over to the D: drive so I don’t have to move or copy data back and forth. When I re-install XP, I redirect those system folders and I’m good to go.

At this point, you might have figured out where I am heading with this…
So here comes Vista… After checking it out and listening to the experience of some of my associates, I decided to upgrade my home system. Most of what I’ve heard from others about their upgrade experience has been positive, so I figured it was worth a shot. I thought about backing up my OS drive, but decided against taking the extra time. I knew it was a risk, but figured I’d do a clean install if needed. I popped in the DVD and kicked off the upgrade. I liked how the ‘questionnaire’ is front-loaded so you can leave it to do its work. It was late, so I let it go and went to bed.

The next morning, it looked like the installation had completed without issues so I kicked the tires around. Some of the software utilities I had loaded in XP didn’t work right in Vista, but it had warned me at the beginning of the installation and therefore wasn’t a surprise. Everything looked good so far. I installed the Nvidia driver for Vista and rebooted the machine. During the reboot, the nvraid BIOS was flashing “degraded”. My D: drive lives on a mirrored-pair of 250GB SATA drives, the only RAID array running in the system. That didn’t look good, but it was mirrored for a reason so I let Vista boot. Sure enough, Vista was seeing the two mirrored drives individually.

I started to poke around the D: drive for my data files and at first glance everything looked alright, all the directories were intact. Then my heart sank and I realized that only the directory structure was there and no files were in those directories. Not a one. Not a single picture of my seven-odd thousand pictures spanning the last seven years. (You know, digital cameras are great… take as many pictures as you want, keep the good ones. But even the not-so-bad ones don’t take up too much space, so I usually keep them too. Kids tend to have the cutest expressions in each different picture ) Panic did not set in right away, because I knew I had a good recovery tool. I use the data recovery tool GetDataBack for NTFS, which does a excellent job of recovering files and I heartily recommend it. (That was an un-paid endorsement). I figured worst case, I’d use that to pull off the files from one of the mirrored drives.

Apparently, during a Windows Vista upgrade, Vista attempts to be ‘smart’ and move your personal files out of the way to make sure they don’t get wacked during the installation. What it doesn’t seem to do, is to see where those files might actually be first. So, in my case, I suppose it did what it thought it needed to do to save my files, and ended up killing them instead. To make matters worse, it also decided to use my D: drive as temporary space during the installation. I discovered this during my session with GetDataBack when attempting to recover the files. Fortunately, I was able to get most of my files back, but definitely not all of them since they had been actually overwritten with some files during the windows installation. I recovered those files off to an external drive and mourning those lost in the process.

So my hope is that this experience might help someone avoid the same issues. If you have had a similar experience I would love to hear from you!

Jim