ok i downloaded windows vista from a torrent site, and went for an upgrade to windows vista home basic, i put in the serial that was supplied with it and everyrthing seemed to be fine until startup and it says that the copy of windows is not genuine and and i couldnt get onto the desktop without a valid serial, so i restarted with my xp disc in and installed a fresh copy of windows without deleting any partitions thinking it would downgrade vista back to xp without deleting any of my stuff...now that i am back on xp it seems that everything has been deleted is there any way to get everything back?
Did you make a partition specifically for vista? If not reinstalling xp over vista will have formatted and overwritten all your drive twice.. You must always use a different partition for different operating systems, asboth vista and xp expect to have all the partition.. (actually every drive and partition in the machine).. just to themselves active@undelete may do something..try some recovery tools. The perils of warez.
Chances are, the data previously stored on the system is going to be severely corrupted. Might as well start completely fresh with XP. BTW, the RC1 of Vista was free...and free to use without a key to test it. No need to trust OSes being downloaded from torrents or warez sites.
Yes....but only if the OS conforms to the "closed" source arena. Such as MAC OSX, Windows...and some Linux distributions.
