replaced vista with xp, now everything is missing

[neonfever]

I've just helped my buddy replace his troublesome vista with xp on his 2.4Ghz MBP (i own original discs for both systems so the problem should not be because of using special 'hacked' versions of xp). Everything was all good until we restarted the system. OSX was gone, and Windows was on a strange partition of 127GB, when it was supposed to be on about 60GB of a 200GB drive. Now we cant even see the other missing space when we run XP or Vista setup again. He has lots of college work in there, so we're holding off from reinstalling OSX for now unless there really is no more hope.

All opinions and advice appreciated. Many thanks.

 

[jdechko]

First off, if the data was so important, then why wasn't it backed up first?

Next off, you probably installed XP on a Fat32 partition, which, with Windows being Windows, is limited to 128 GB (actually 127.6 but who's counting).

Don't know what exactly happened, but I'd be willing to say that you let Windows mess with the drive partitioning instead of using the BootCamp partition.

I'm thinking that most of the data (if not all) is going to be irrecoverable. I'd say that there's little to no hope of recovering that data.

Hopefully the lesson has been learned that having a good data backup is a necessity.

 

[jackiecanev2]

Wirelessly posted (BB 8900: BlackBerry8900/4.6.1.250 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/301)

Sounds like you installed XP over the OSX partition. XP won't see the old vista partition (the bootloader won't, anyway, but it should be visible under the OS). 200gb drive ~ 189 gb useable, so 60gb for the old vista partition would leave about 130gb from the old OSX partition. Sorry dude.

 

[neonfever]

Thanks for the swift response guys. Sounds like we made a noob error. I for one feel really bad because I've done this a million times on my mac and all my friend's macs and this is the first time such a thing has happened.

Just out of curiousity, what do you think happened to the vista partition as it does not pop up in the the boot menu.


Cheers.

 

[jdechko]

I think the vista partition got overwritten as well.

Check this. In XP, right-click on "My Computer" and Click Manage. Then click on "Disk Management". Select drive C:. This will give you a visual representation of your drive partition. If you have a partition of about 60GB that shows up as "Unallocated" space, then you've only got the one partition for XP on it. Post a screenshot here.

From the sounds of it, though, you're going to have to wipe all your partitions and reinstall OS X and then step through bootcamp again. Do that, and apologize to your friend immensely. Buy him a 6-pack (if you're both of legal drinking age, that is).