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Semi-quick update on my efforts to make a custom dual boot backup iso- fail-

I ended up just taking some old hard drives I had and using a disk duplicator and duplicating my main HD to those- they work perfectly, and will save a ton of time if I ever have something happen to my current drive.

In the process though, I also tried using macrium reflect to clone one of the backup drives I made to a smaller ssd- which isn’t easy to do, and infsct gave me a lot of trouble, as the process, unbeknownst to me deactivated the drive. I went through 5 days of researching what the error messages I was getting meant, and trying to find out how to correct them, and got all kinds of advice from forums which went nowhere. I spent a lot of time in the windows command cmd app, trying to repair the mbr and boot etc. I can’t count how many times I had to u hook the drive and put my current drive back in just to look up ehat to do next- very frustrating

Anyway, long story short, as a last resort, I went back into the cmd uti,ity, assigned a drive letter to the “dead” drive, then went into disk management uti,ity, and right clicked on the “dead” drive, to see what choices I had, and one was “make active”, so I tried that and lo and behold it worked! All of the other advice I had gotten got me nowhere.

In tne process I made a huge mistake and wiped out my backup drive by mistakenly deleting partitions on the wrong disk in disk management- nearly 2 tb of photos, programs and backup stuff!

What a nightmare that was. Again, several days trying to find out “how to restore accidently deleted HD contents”

Turns out that a program called “Testdisk” which is free saved the day and saw all the files, and was able to restore the info or list of files to the HD

Apparently just because drive partitions gets deleted, they aren’t gone, just the list of the files on the drive is removed, and so the drive appears empty- repopulating the list shows all the files on the drive again.

Anyway, it has been a very interesting and mentally exhausting week or so, but now my main HD is backed up a few times so I can restore my current system and preferred settings and programs anytime I want, bu5 never did get a working custom iso though.

"wiped out my backup drive by mistakenly deleting partitions on the wrong disk"

I've done that more times than I am willing to admit.. (especially since I usually have more than 5 HDs at a time hooked up, and have been that way as far back as I can remember. It can be tedious, especially if you are keeping track of which one is which (notes come in handy in that case).) 🫢

"partitions gets deleted, they aren’t gone"

Not sure if it is still this way (I am sure it is, but haven't messed with that issue in a LONG time), but all that is deleted is the first letter of the name of the file (which is replaced with a question mark until it is overwritten, or restored).

If I was there, I would help out, I hate trying anything over the net or on the phone. Much better to be there to look at the issue first hand.
Great job restoring it pretty much with little (or no) help 😃