Member Avatar for Stefano Mtangoo

Hello guys,
I have my laptop that came with Vista Home premium. Today I tried to install Solaris 10 but it failed. I tried to boot my Vista it failed also. Then I used Gparted to remove Solaris partition by deleting it; That made my laptop unbootable with error "No Active partition".

Since I was fool enough NOT to backup my system, I don't know what to do! I have googled alot but All I get is commercial softwares and Cannot buy (No credit card). How can I do it? I want to recover my Programs I got from GAOTD. Help please!!

Steve

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A few practical notes that aren’t in the thread and are useful now that a factory reset was done (): stop using the laptop for anything that writes to disk. Every write lowers the chance of recovering lost photos. Power it down and, if possible, remove the drive so you can work on it from another computer without touching the original Windows installation.

If recovery is worth the effort, make a bit‑for‑bit copy of the drive and do all recovery work on that copy. A tool designed to clone drives while handling bad sectors (for example, GNU ddrescue) is the right approach for creating a safe image; work from the image and not the original. After imaging, run a file‑carving photo recovery tool against the image — PhotoRec is very effective for JPEGs and many other formats (PhotoRec). If those tools don’t find everything, professional data recovery is the only reliable option for badly overwritten data.

About the Giveaway‑of‑the‑Day programs: licenses and registration entries often live in the registry or in an activation file. If the old drive is readable, extract the offline registry hives and use a key‑finder such as ProduKey to pull stored product keys (ProduKey). Also search old email accounts for activation messages or keepers from GAOTD. If installers or keys can’t be recovered, contact the software vendors — some will reissue keys with proof of prior entitlement.

For future safety: keep a simple 3‑part plan — (1) regular file backups (cloud or external drive), (2) periodic full disk images, and (3) store license keys/installers off the machine (password manager or external storage). As raised, preserve recovery media or vendor support contact info now, and as suggested, treat imaging as the first step before making risky changes.

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Member Avatar for Stefano Mtangoo

I Want to do Fresh installation but how can I do backups for My GAOTD softwares??
Thanks

Member Avatar for pjhutch

A few questions:
1. Do you have a Vista DVD or a Restore disc or even a hidden partition with vista on it?
2. Have you got a Linux Live CD to boot from and do a backup of the HD to an external device eg USB HD, DVD etc?
3. You can make a disc active using a DOS disk and a tool such as FDISK or Ranish Partition Manager (free btw)!

Member Avatar for airbourne

If you simply want to recover your files, you can use a program called BartPE. In order to build your BartPE bootable CD, you will need access to a Windows Vista machine.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

Once you have created your BartPE bootable CD, you can then boot using that disc and you will be in a "windows like shell" where you can copy files to a network location or USB Drive.

Once your data is secure, you can wipe it out and start over. If you don't have the original install disks for your OS, you will need those. You will also need your original install disks for your programs, or download them again from the web.

Once you are all done and you have learned your lesson about always backing up =(^_^)= I recommend a program called CloneZilla to make an image of your desktop just before you make life altering changes.

http://www.clonezilla.org/

All software I spoke about is Open Source and free of charge, so you should not need any credit cards.

Member Avatar for Stefano Mtangoo

Thanks all dears,
It is too late and I did factory reset. I have done some photo recovery and some data are gone.

Good lesson by the way though in hard way bu I accept it. Thanks everyone for you help. I should backup everything now before I tamper with my beautiful laptop

God blesss you aaaaaaaaall

Steve

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