Windows 7 O/S versus Windows Live OneCare

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  I brought this all on myself, I fully admit.  Circumstances led me to a very nasty place.
  
  I have been an XP O/S user for years.  I have Live OneCare doing my backups and never lost a file.  I was fat and happy thinking I was protected.
  
  Then my hard drive died and I went to Best Buy to get another SATA.  The smallest one they had was 500 GB, so I bought it.  Well, it turns out that XP won't natively handle an SATA that large.  No problem, it comes with a CD.  Well, it turns out XP won't let you use the CD drive during the installation step, the driver has to be on a floppy drive.  A floppy drive?  I haven't had a floppy on the last two machines I've built.  So, I borrowed a USB floppy drive and manually download the drivers to the floppy drive on my work laptop.  Well, it turns out my BIOS doesn't load USB floppy drives as A: during the boot-up process, so that didn't work.
  
  Well, an IT guy at work suggested I just surrender to the flow and upgrade to an O/S created in this decade ... he handed me a copy of the Windows 7 Beta, Build 7100.  That O/S will natively access the SATA drive I just bought.  I actually thought I was making progress.  That worked and I installed Office and configured Outlook ... downloaded my recent mail and realized I had none of my archived mail.  Of course, I didn't!  All those emails were backed-up by Live OneCare, compressed with an algorithm unknown to me.  I'll just download Windows Live OneCare and use it to restore my stuff.
  
  Well, it turns out that Windows 7 does not allow Window Live OneCare to be installed.  The resolution?  Don't do that.  Yep, just don't get into a situation where you need to restore files that were compressed by Windows Live OneCare.  Well, it turns out that I was already in that situation and couldn't avoid it.
  
  Any ideas out there?  You guys are tricky ... is there any hope for my data?

  Friday, September 11, 2009 7:14 PM