[NTLUG:Discuss] Needles in a haystack

[Lenrek Xunil]

OK here's what happened.  Two weeks ago.  My bro's wife asked me to look at
the Windows XP PC.  They had just bought a new hard drive and new memory as
I had recommended, and they had installed both, with the new drive as the
slave drive.  The old memory was bad, and it may have correpted some OS and
registry data.  I went to look at it, and tried downloading an antivirus.
The thing was so slow and messed up that it would keep freezing, and I'm not
one for waiting for a windoze machine... so hard shutdown.  I do this from
time to time on various PC's without much problem.  After the hard shutdown,
I tried to boot up in safe mode.  Right after that, I was not able to bring
up windows.

What I should have done at that point is take it home, put the drive on my
PC (where it is now), and back up the data.   I could have planned out what
I was going to do, such as back up the data, set the switches, install the
OS on the newer drive, etc.  But she insisted that I stay and work on it. It
was close to midnight on a weekday, and I had been a long day. I think it
made her uneasy not knowing, but I should have told her it was best to
wait.  Users conclude that if the PC doesn't boot up, the data is lost and
the PC is broken.  I just didn't do a good job at explaining and making her
feel at ease.  I was tired, and I had get up at 5 am to go to work.  So I
wasn't in my best frame of mind.

I boot up with SuSe 9 to see what I can do.  I knew I needed newer tools,
but to download an OS, burn it, LEARN IT, etc.... just not enough time -- I
wanted to get some sleep.  My CD's were corrupted and I wasn't having much
luck with Linux.  By then it was about 2 am.  I thought, well, I'll just
install Windows on the second drive.  I didn't even bother taking the hard
drives out, setting the  master/slave switches, etc.,   So I booted up the
Windows install disk, and made sure that I formatted the new drive (slave)
and not the old drive (master) with the data.  Yeah, bad idea.  Of course if
you install on the second drive, it still is going to change data on the
first, at least the MBR. Somwhere I must have hit enter and it formatted the
first partition on the old drive, the one that had the windows installation
and the "documents and settings" folder.  I noticed after the installation
was done.  Eventually I had to leave, and told them not to touch the
computer.

I've been so busy these past few weeks, and I wanted to make sure I didn't
make the same mistake twice, so I took my time and waited until I got into
the right frame of mind.  So here I am, two weeks later, running test disk
on that old drive.  It's been running for hours.  I want to access the
user's documents, and I was hoping for something structured like restoring
"documents and settings" with the folder structure intact.  Instead, there's
these directories that look like "recup_dir.109".  And in them is all sorts
of text files, html files, jpg files... a LOT of IE cache stuff.  There a
few word docs, some open up, some don't.  Makes it real hard to find the
important files.  I can't tell.... did you save that picture or were you
just looking at a myspace page?  There's no way to know.  Many people used
this PC, and each family member logged into their own account.  I don't just
want to hand them a CD of scatter files and say, "ok, here you go".  It's
like handing them pieces of broken glass.  And it also infringes on each
member's privacy.  Who was looking at that?  I'd rather not know, and I'd
rather they don't have to ask that question to each other.  I just want to
give them back the documents they had in each of their "my documents" folder
with minimal hassle.

ANY SUGGESTIONS???????