I've been trying to do this weekly stream of updating through Windows from 1 to 10 on a Pentium 4, and I've run into a snag.

I reached Windows ME.

This week, between streams I was doing some work. And I was concerned I wouldn't have enough room on the 2GB FAT16 partition to upgrade to XP. GParted gave the option to go beyond 2GB, but I was a bit weary of that since as far as I knew that was the limit.

But....may as well try it.

So I booted to my Ghost disk, took an image to my external drive. Watched the progress bar slowly move across, acting as if it was writing data to my drive, when in reality it was creating a 0mb file and pretending to take a backup. Which, to me, is rather malicious for backup software to display a progress bar while not actually doing anything! Not only that, when it finished, it gave no error or indication anything went wrong. I've done this process many times, so I thought nothing of this ,bar went across, took the right amount of time, made a file on my external.....why in the hell the software couldn't recognize it wasn't writing data and throw up an error or alert about this, I don't get, but I'm absolutely FURIOUS with Symantec right now for sabotoging me with their half-assed programming.

But, continuing on.....I expanded the FAT16 partition a little beyond 2 GB, and when rebooting, it won't boot, of course.

I booted with my ME boot disk, and it sees there's a C: drive, but fails to see any content on it.

I booted GParted again, sized it back down to it's original size. I was rather alarmed to see GParted now identifies the partition as FAT32 instead of FAT16. It seems rather sloppy programming to me if GParted took it upon itself to convert my FAT16 partition to FAT32 without warning or alert when expanding it. Good programming means making it idiot proof.....not just assuming one wants the required steps to be done, and instead verifying a change from FAT16 to FAT32. Not that I'm sure that's what happened, but still, there are many elements of sloppy programming I keep encountering. After resizing it down, I still get it to fail to see content on the C: drive when booting to my boot disk. It sees there's a C: drive, fails to see content on it. Running fdisk, it does still see the partition as FAT16 from there.

Anyways, I have no backup thanks to the lazy programmers at Symantec, and I have a partition that seems to be borked, but the data should still be sitting on the disk. How do I repair this partition now?