What is going on With Windows 7 and all my xp hardware?

Question

Hi, I dont normally ask fro help in forums, as a computor silver surfer user since windows 95, I generally manage to get a resolution by sheer home learning, But Im livid with this new computor i just bought, which i can not get any of my xp components to run or be recognised by this awful windows 7, Im near to taking out the Hard Drive Out and buying a new one, and putting Xp on it.
First off, sorry if bit long winded, but there is two major issues, one non Sound card related, one creative labs one is.
First, can someone tell me, why , when i connected my vertabim 320gig usb external drive, which was connected to my win xp for a year. Windows 7 kept asking me in middle of email,s middle of games, what wanted to do with it's? In the end, i got a message saying do u want to use this drive for nero backup, well, as this is a back up drive, i said yes, imagine my horror, when i found it had changed its name to "Volume drive E;" not F: even worse, all 60 gig of movies built up over 5 years had been completely wiped off? There is nothing left in it now, just a folder calling itself backup. but everything else has been erased. is there a chance its been saved somewhere else in win7?
Second problem, I use Soundbaster audigy cards for a very long time, which has a graphic equalizer in it, which i must have, to enable certain programs like ASIO that need to fine tuned using a graphic equalizer, my last one i bought 3 months ago, after old one packed up, I took it out of the xp computor, and reactivated the onboard xp one, so i can still use it, But once it was put in this new win7 grr computor, my problems started,as soon i restarted after installation at start up i got a runtime error win32 blah blah, which has still not gone away,god knows where that came from. After 3 attempts at instaling the card from the disc all was ok with graphic equalizer too, however next day, Wind 7 decided, I couldnt have it, and everytime i started it to edit a wave with it, it kept telling me no device supporting it !! THEN IT GOT WORSE, it downloaded something called Alchemy, which was a creative update, now i have no graphic equalizer at all now, and terrible tinny sound from my good 2. surround system worse than the inbult one, which was disabled. i have searched and searched, and spent 3 days now, trying to get the software to work , these being the G.E. the eax and bass boost etc. Every Win7 downloads for creative labs audigy card, wether from here or third partys have failed to install the components I must have. I bought and tried some demo graphic equalizers from cows site, None of them interracted with any of them, it was if they werent there, although inputs and outputs was set to the card it found. After spending another 8 hours today trying to sort this, I found other sound cards made by creative on amazon, which i use a lot, to my horror, the only cards that seem to have a G.E. and works with win 7 costs 177!! There is no way im going from a 120 sounblaster to 177 xfi, just cos i need a system graphic equalizer, Im just about to upgrade my photoshop elements 4, to elements 9, cos win7 wont accept the 4.0 version. so that another 155...!!!! i rather take out the whole H/D and buy a new one and reinstall XP. got to be better than paying out 130, its insane!! Notes or comments on how, if at all, I can get this sounblaster audigy G.E to work would be greatly welcome, as would the lost 60 gig of videos from my external drive.
Cheers mike

Answer 1

First of all, why did you say yes to Nero Back up before researching what it does with files already on the HDD? When I install Nero, the Back Up is the first thing I disable, it is a nagging pain, there are much better backup programs available. There are several file recovery programs out there to recover deleted files, that is, if that is what happened. Also, if you haven't overwritten the files, so you should be able to find them.