Going back to Windows XP
I decided to give up on Ubuntu, which is a version of Linux. I like it. I prefer, Linux as an operating system but after almost a year, I need to go back to Windows, at least until I have more than one PC. The biggest problem is 
that I use Quicken for banking and I use Adobe’s awesome Lightroom to process my digital pictures. I can use Jessie’s PC but she’s usually obsessed on one of her games. Its also awkward for me to use. She’s got it setup for her.
SO I spent the last couple off days preparing to install Windows Home XP to the drive my Ubuntu is installed on. I’ve copied my data files to my USB drive. I dug up my Sony VAIO recovery CDs and slapped them in and formatted my drive. I only found one drive.
Now I usually turn off external drives during an install process just to prevent any confusion. My external drive is about the same size as my internal drive. Windows indicated it was going to erase my C drive so I went ahead.
When I restarted my PC, Ubuntu started. Now that really confused me. Then slowly it occurred to me I had just formatted my external drive. I have backups of most of it. Problem is those backups are 8000 miles away. Some things I don’t have backups for at all. I lost the keys to all the software I bought online.
I hope I haven’t lost pictures. I think the pictures are on Jessie’s computer too. I wish I had purchased that online backup system I was looking at. I’ve had them in the past and they work great but I was caught vulnerable and now I’m gonna pay for my mistake. I’ve been using PC’s since 19985 and this is the first time I got caught this badly. I should have had a backup. Hard drives ALWAYS fail eventually. Though the drive is pretty new and I’ve had drives last 10 years or more, they all will eventually die.
I found some tools that will unformat a drive but those only work if the drive has not been written to. Since I installed Windows on the drive, its been written to so that’s not an option. I will back up the data files I have on my internal drive and then I hope I can figure out how to get Windows to recognize the drive. I’m sure there is a way. I probably have to install Ubuntu again and format the drive with a different option, though I’m not sure.
Is there someone out there that knows how? Is so, please share.
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Tagged with: Computers • Linux • Ubuntu • Windows
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You didn’t say how your external drives are connected – USB? Just disconnect it/them and that will leave only one drive to be recognized by the system.
If it is not recognized, you may have to do another install of Windows XP and it should recognize the drive then.
Then plug in your external drives one by one and they should be given their own drive letters once the drivers have been installed by Win XP.
Good luck.
I thought I said USB drive but doesn’t matter how connected. Still turn them off. :) I usually do just that, turn them off before doing something like this in order to prevent the kind of confussion I ran into. This time I forgot to do that and I got stung. :
Windows will not recognize my internal drive because I formatted it with ext3.
I’m trying now to find out if I can use ubuntu to format in NTFS. Has to be a way to do it, surely once you instsall Ubuntu in ext 3 the drive is foreverr Ubuntu after that.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7735951&posted=1#post7735951