Dumb question, but try not to laugh too hard

Actually ...

The D partition may not be the lifesaver you think it is. You should definitely still create backups to a physically separate drive.

My computer came formatted with two partitions, C and D. Aside from making things incredibly difficult when my Documents folder started getting big (I couldn't just transfer Pictures and Music over and keep all the shortcuts built into the OS working), when I wound up with a corrupt OS problem and had to use my product recovery disks, both partitions were wiped and reformatted as a single drive.

Well firstly, no medium is safe, regardless of external or internal, physical or Logical. Although it is a good idea of keeping your data on an external drive however that can cause issues as well (as it is connected via USB or Firewire ports). Additionally you can save your data on to the DVD discs however they can be scratched. You can also save the information onto the SD cards/USB sticks however that can be damaged too.

In addition to that there could be a security issue as your data is lying around in multiple locations and if disc or external hard drive get lost, you going to loose your information.

As regard to your issue of the corruption I would have taken the hard drive out and put it into another machine as a slave and moved all my data. The physical data does not get damaged upon OS damage.

Another strange thing is, when your computer came with pre-built two partitions how could a recovery disc made 1 single partition unless or otherwise chosen to do so. The Recovery discs are images of the actual computer when sold. So if it was with 2 partitions it should have made 2 partitions as it came new.

Saying that it could have been many things which could have caused a single drive partition.

Although the data can be lost pretty easily in any medium including USB sticks, however, USB sticks are the most verstile and easy to carry mediums. I usually use USB sticks with my everyday used data (either it is documents or music etc).

Regards

Of course no medium is fully free from being corrupted or damaged. But I'm saying don't rely on another partition on your harddrive for your backups.

My computer is a laptop; getting the hard drive out would have been a long-winded endeavour and as it's under warranty I would have had to send it off to avoid invalidating my warranty. As I could still do many day-to-day tasks, I simply made sure my back-ups (to a) external hard drive and b) old laptop) were fully up to date and used the recovery disk.

By the way - recovery disk was not the first thing I attempted, I used the OS's various tools for fixing errors and so on. I managed to fix a couple of things but not everything.

The recovery disk made a single partition. As I prefer the 120GB hard disk in a single partition and know how to make one if needed (e.g. I've partitioned my external hard drive so that there's a separate section for some backups for a friend), it was just fine with me.

In my experience, you should make back-ups regularly (Vista has a feature that'll do them automatically for you ) and if you're working on something important, back it up to several places as you work. You never know when something might go wrong and your file goes skewy.

Changing or getting data from a laptop doesn't always require opening it up. You can use different tools to extract data. As you said some of the tools you have tried, however there are some tools which runs solely from the disc and can help you recover your data .

I personally don't like backing up at several places as I tend to forget what was saved where however I do agree that we should back up information on either regular or weekly basis.

Regards