My main editing and storage PC has been causing all sorts of problems for me recently and this weekend I made the decision to reinstall the operating system (Windows XP) to try improve the performance. I have a long IT background and this is a fairly routine task which I've performed hundreds of times with little or no problems. This time however Windows XP decided to clear my disk partition information during the initial setup which caused a major headache.

Due to the storage requirements on hundreds of Canon RAW files and processed photographs I have a number of disk drives in my system. All are partitioned and used for the various stage of my workflow. After the initial reinstall my main photograph partition and data partitions were both unavailable. The drives were visible and a blank unformated partition was in their place. Panic quickly set in and I loaded my external hard drives to see how current my backups were. Due to some reorganisation I'd been doing all of my pre 2007 photographs were not backed up and none of my more recent shoots were accessible either.

After many hours of messing around I was fortunately able to recover the original partitions and data from my drives. After a few more hours I got all of my software reinstalled and will see how the computer behaves from now on. It's  still being cranky so I may find myself ordering a new system soon. The moral of this story however is make sure you have backups of everything important and not just some of it. Had the drive actually failed I would have been completely stuck so regular backups are worth the time and effort.