(Note: there were reports that newer versions of Acronis did not display the quality that I had found during these years of using the 2011 version.) There were other imaging programs that might have permitted the same steps I just wasn’t familiar with most of them. I ran it from a bootable CD, so I didn’t need the imaged drive to be bootable. To make the image, I used my trusty old copy of Acronis True Image Home 2011. That would accomplish two things: it would give me a backup, however belated, and it would let me experiment on a the backup, or a copy of the backup, without any more tinkering with the original drive.
I decided that the first thing I should do was to make an image of the messed-up drive.
If anything, these random efforts only made things worse: I believe that, at one point, I told Testdisk to try rewriting the boot record, or something like that. I flailed around for a while longer, and then finally decided to start over and proceed one step at a time. The Testdisk program (in Ubuntu, run from a customized bootable USB) said, “The following partitions can’t be recovered,” and I got something similar from other tools. I flailed around for a while, but it appeared the drive was trashed. Whatever it was, it completely screwed up the drive. I wasn’t sure whether it was GParted, or the decision to set the resulting PROGRAMS partition to the minimum size, or perhaps something else. Ordinarily I preferred to use something like MiniTool Partition Wizard, but in this case I was being lazy - I did not have a bootable USB drive handy that would run MiniTool on this machine. GParted was normally a decent tool, but in this case it messed up, and that dimly reminded me that I might have had a problem with GParted once before. To review those problems in slightly more detail, the backup wasn’t essential - this was old data - but then again I did not actually intend to lose it entirely. It wasn’t a bad plan, except (1) I should have backed up the drive before attempting the partition and (2) I used GParted, a Linux tool, for the partitioning, and (3) I attempted to make the PROGRAMS partition as small as possible, reasoning that I would be moving data out of there and leaving a lot of empty space. Then I would move the data files from the PROGRAMS partition to the new DATA partition. The idea was that the partitioning program would move all of the existing material over to one side of the drive, in the new PROGRAMS partition, and there would be this whole new empty DATA partition. I decided to divide this drive into two partitions, called PROGRAMS and DATA.
I had an old hard drive, containing both Windows program files and data in one partition. This post explores one set of possibilities. There are many different scenarios for losing data stored on a computer drive.