A few days ago my dad offered my brother and I 200 dollars to find pictures of a pool job he had done years ago on an external hard drive. There is 28gb worth of pictures etc on the hdd and they are recovered from my moms old xp computer. My brother jumped at the oppurtunity downloading a trial software called acronis true image and tried recovering 6 or 7 large .tib files from the harddrive. The laptop he was using restarted after recovering the files and could not boot windows 7 anymore. I gave it a shot on my computer thinking he must have ran out of hard drive space to recover the files. the same thing happens after i restart the computer. Since it cant boot windows 7 for some reason i put in a cd with a different linux type os. I find that the recovery deleted my old user and EVERYTHING else on my computer and put the recovered files in its place. Not sure why it did this but i delete ALL the recovered files so i can install windows 7 again on my computer. Does anyone Know a solution to this? Mabye i need to have windows xp installed to correctly recover without errors? I feel like the reason it didnt boot was because i needed windows xp. Is there a way i can install both windows 7 and Xp and use Xp to recover the files?