ElrondHi. I'm back. I had EasyRecovery running and I didn't want to chance a conflict so I came out of everything until it finished. I think I got everything back. It looks right,...about 30GB...I'm still doing an inventory. It looks good though. I'm also burning a CD with it all. Learned a valuable lesson about using multiple HD's as back up tho!!!!!Looking over the steps I took (my earlier post) can you see what I did wrong? I didn't try to restore ME until after all this started. It has the appearance that the simple act of removing the HD from it's nest is what caused the partition to crash but I didn't think that was possible.I appreciate the help and once again, thank youBobL

Thanks Elrond,Interesting- I can recall a Compaq (barf) Restore CD that did this too (different situation to this)- put me off any system that supplies one of these! :)Bruce.

Hi Bob,I'm glad to hear your data is safe. I was a bit worried that some of it might have been overwritten by the restore you attempted, so its great to hear you got it all.I don't think you did anything wrong, per se, so don't beat yourself up over it in the least. Moving a drive from one machine to another is perfectly safe and fine as long as the computer is unplugged of course :-) (I must do that a thousand times a month some months) so that almost assuredly wasn't the problem. It'd be impossible for me to tell you exactly what happened since I wasn't there, but I get the feeling that the drive connection was somewhat loose or similar, enough for it to be recognized by the BIOS but most likely intermittently. Once you saw a problem, it looks like you tried the Restore disc provided by Gateway to get an OS on there. These discs are usually not real OS discs, but custom made image discs that restore a drive to its identical setup as shipped by these manufactures. That means it wipes the drives and replaces everything with the image on the CD (OS, apps, utilities, etc). Sort of like Norton Ghost if you've ever seen that program, but proprietary to each name brand manufacturer.Its actually good that the Restore disc had problems installing correctly or you might have lost much of the data as the image over wrote the first gig or more of the drive. But it did seem to get far enough to erase the Fat32 table and partition data on the drive before it error'd. While this may make a partition unavailable to Windows, it doesn't erase the actual data that was on the drive - so EasyRecovery (or similar tool) would still be able to retrieve this data even if Windows didn't recognize and mount the partition.The above is an educated guess of course taken from what you've described so far - but it could have been many other situations. Regardless, if you've retrieved the data that you need, thats all that matters. For future reference though, I'd be careful of using manufacturer supplied Restore discs unless you have all of your important data backed up first. And indeed, backing up your data is a very hard lesson we all had to learn at some point unfortunately - usually by loosing important data! Believe me, we've all been there :-( (and those who haven't will at some point, thats a guarantee).Anyways, glad all is ok now.Take care,http://members.rogers.com/eelvish/elrondlogo.gifhttp://members.rogers.com/eelvish/flyurl.gif

heh.."Interesting- I can recall a Compaq (barf)"My sentiments exactly, Bruce. I usually don't say such things in public, but your stark statement made me smile... :-) And now we have an even bigger HPaq with I'm sure even more proprietary hardware to deal with... Ugh. :-(The only "name-brand" system I ever actually liked was the old Micron's back in their heyday... Truly powerful systems comprised of all standard equipment - just the best picks of everything. Todays Micron's may still be nice (I haven't seen one in a long while), but nothing like the Micron's of ten years ago. Actually, there was this one other beautiful Cube system from some other long lost brand name I can't remember about ten years ago as well. I was Dying to purchase one of those. Never did though unfortunately (it'd probably sell on the collector market in twenty more years for a hundred grand it was so unique). Too bad because it was a beauty of a system with a five foot a side square black cube case that fit dual motherboards and about twenty 5in drives... The same thing today (if available) would probably cost less than four grand if home assembled (and of course much, much more powerful)... My how times change!Anyways... I'm rambling. :-)Take care,http://members.rogers.com/eelvish/elrondlogo.gifhttp://members.rogers.com/eelvish/flyurl.gif

Thank You againBobL

My thoughts exactly, Elrond. It's great to hear from you, as usual.Bruce.