#@$%ing Windows...

[amigadave]

Hope you can recover it somehow Matt.  I know the feeling, though I have been lucky lately and have become much better about backing up my important data regularly.  Having an external USB 1TB hdd that I can move from one computer to another to make backups of each system has made it so much easier for me to keep up with a more-or-less regular schedule.

Now if some day I plug it into my Vista Ultimate computer and it screws up all of the partitions on the 1TB drive and I lose all of my backup data, I would be very upset too.  (keeping fingers crossed)

[amigadave]

You're actually quite lucky with a dumb file system like fat32, sound like you just dinged the directory list, any good file recovery program, run in MS Windows of course, should be able to recover those files.

@AmigaDave

What's the point of partition a small drive like 1TB?  Wouldn't it be happier as just one large drive?

I know that 1TB drives are not the largest you can get in most retail electronic stores anymore with external 2TB drives becoming more common, but a year ago when I bought it, 1TB was considered a fairly large external USB drive.  Having more than one partition makes it easier for me to keep track of the 3 computers that I backup onto it.

Or was your entire line of questioning about my 1TB drive being sarcastic?

[amigadave]

No, I just find that partitioning drives leads to instability.  It's never more frustrating to have a large video file and not have room because of bad partitioning.  But I suppose if you are booting multiple OSs...

This is an external 1TB hard drive with a USB interface that I take from computer to computer and only use it as a storage device for backup archives.  I don't boot anything from this external hard drive.  It's sole purpose is to keep my backup archives safe in case one of my computers goes down.