data recovery succeed!

last week laptop crashed. sent to LAN support department for a few days. eventually I was informed they cannot do anything but format and try to reinstall XP. damn it. all my kids's pictures will get lost. and all the documents.

struggled for whole afternoon to burn a bootable XP cd with Recuva , but failed

went home, find a rescue linux cd. happy :). download TestDisk for linux. copy it to usb hdd. boot laptop with linux rescue cd and run testdisk. it's easy!!! find all the files(80GB) and copy them out.

from now on, switch to linux even I'm in windows.