Once in a while you do something completely stupid. Once in a while this totally stupid thing turns out to be a fantabulous learning experience.
In the mist of trying to recover a 1T B Sata Hard drive using Disk Commander, I stupidly removed all the partition information from my main drive on my laptop. It seemed to be the end of a perfect day, yet in the midst of preparring to commit seppoku, I decided to see if I could use the same tool to recover the lost partition. Behold, not only did it recover it so I could at worst transfer all of my documents and data off for a reload, I was able to boot up off my old trusty ERD CD and make the partition active. Voila, saved the whole system, no reload needed and everything where it was supposed to be. Plus the darn thing is working faster now. Go figure.
I talk about tools I use, and most people wonder how I find them. Usually from co-workers, articles on tech sites, recommendations from forums, etc. I usually will try them out after researching them for saftey, and if they don’t do a good job I’ll just uninstall them and move on. The bottom line is don’t be afraid to try software out. You might find a diamond in the rough that you can’t live without, and will save your hide.