Hi all, I was using windows vista. My hard drive crashed a few days back. This means. I have to buy another, but I am obviously bothered about my data recovery. Apparently in many cases, it is possible to recover data, but I have one concern: I want some kind of whole image,whole environment of my system back. By environment, I mean: -- all installed programs with their settings. -- Firefox with all bookmarks,all cookies, privacy settings etc. -- Registry entries.. -- Those system convenient settings like: group folders as per type, display sidebar, optimize vista for performance than visuals etc etc. Is is possible to get the whole environment back, or I will have to reproduce it painstakingly. Thanks,
Do you have an image backup somewhere?? If you are this particular about your system, I would suggest buying a couple drives and back up regularly to the second drive. Maybe acronis or similar. Using different partitions on the same drive still leaves you in this predicament. You will probably have to reproduce the 'environment' on your own..
Too late . . . You can recover your files but you cannot create an ex post facto image backup, if that is what you are asking. And, if crashed=does not function, then you would have to rely on a data recovery service which disassembles the HDD and then tries to read the data on the disks - the cost of which is usually proportional to the amount of data to be recovered, which is usually very costly. The only other thing I would add is to amplify what 911medic suggests. Considering our reliance on computers, backups are not a luxury: they are essential. As 911medic also points out, a second HDD (or a box full of DVDs - half as many with dual layer discs) is also essential; the likelihood of two HDDs crashing at the same time is nil. No judgment intended but not having a backup plan is, well . . . silly. As you are shopping for a new HDD, get two: prices are dirt cheap for SATA 300-500MB internals, slightly higher for USB. In the least, you can backup critical data (to include things like Bookmarks, JPEGs, MP3s, etc) to DVDs. Regardless, baring your spending mucho deniro for a private recovery service, your data is lost. Monk
Totally agree with HMonk and 911medic, allways backup your system maybey to late now but there are some programs spinrite and hdd regererator may work just to get your drive running enought to backup your data forget OS system because it maybey allready corrupted, also do a have any friend that may have a windows PE cd or bart PE, may sound funny but i have recovered quite a few files booting from PE and the hard drive works for some reason, well enought to get data if you are lucky. but in saying that there is allways booting from your vista dvd and trying chkdsk when in recovery console. P.S. Maybey wrong here saying chkdsk in vista i know it is there in XP i ain't been unlucky enough for that to happen to me yet but i do have acronis backups on other hard drives and dvd, learnt by my mistakes Edit: sorry if you do manage to get access to your hard drive firefox settings in Vista are stored in C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla hope this helps