Thank you... Thank you... Thank you...
As you may guess, I won't really give up, but this is going to take time, be a learning experience, and hopefully some helpful exercise for my creeping AZ.
Am finding that in my smarter years, I saved much of the important stuff... l wills, titles and legal stuff on CD's or thumb drives.
The UBCD ISO brings me to "Parted Magic"... a linux program that is supposed to allow "fixing" of whatever's broken... It lets me in to Firefox, so I can stiil explore the problems and do email etc. The rest of linux... not so easy for a newbie, especially a newbie that has no idea of what the acronyms mean.
Anyway, I can still see all of the original system... files etc, etc., so expect after a while I'll be able to find "stuff".
The strangest problem came from my accidental formatting of, and putting UBCD on that 2T hard drive. First... the device manager sees and names the file. The problem is that windows doesn't recognize the drive in any way. At one time, I found a site that said the "descriptor code" was missing. For the techies... I connected the hard drive to my Sony Media Player.... It shows the UBCD Files, so the drive is ok... (Sony doesn't do anything, as it's looking for picture, music, or photo files)... which all were deleted when I accidentally formatted the drive.
Seagate is an unfriendly support site... Windows tries to be helpful but it would take three years to follow their instructions. I'll try some of the suggestions that ali stair and jimbee made...
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As to Windows 10... Since the world didn't fall apart, I'm guessing that most upgrades went well, with no problems. If that had been the case with me, I'd be a Microsoft fan... when I go to the web for answers, I find that not everyone is in good shape. Some of my specific questions bring up Google hits of more than 1 million, to the point that there are more questions than answers. The answers that seem to work, are not "fixit" programs, but lines and lines of Dos commands.
Fortunately, my computers are all old, refurbs,or hand me downs where my investment in total for 7 computers is less than $2K. Going forward, will likely look at Apple.
Did Microsoft help themselves with this new roll out?
Just my opinion...