Cannot play RS after recovery

[Spartan 666]

I have a very old RS installation (0.8, then 0.9, then 1.0, hotfixes, 1.5, 1.5 hotfixes) but it has always worked fine. Now, since I hate installing and uninstalling RTW, I saved my game in my outer mobile hard disk. It was a perfectly working RS with BI. I used to play it by having it in the secondary partition of my notebook hard disk (I didn't install it, just copy\pasted it from my outer hard disk). To be precise, the target was D:\Roma Surrectum 1.5. I played it with BI, so the complete target line was

"D:\Rome - Total War RS 1.5\RomeTW-BI.exe" -show_err -mod: -nm

And it worked fine.

Well, my pc crashed and I had to format it, but only the primary partition, not the one in which RS is. Now, when I try to run it with the same target in the link which I have on the desktop, it starts loading, all of a sudden it crashes saying "RTW has stopped working". Yes, I have Vista SP 1 with all updates...and UAC off...

[Squid]

Re-install RS, further RS1.5 was never intended to be installed over any previous version of RS so I'd do a clean 1.5c Full Install over a clean RTW 1.5 install.

[Spartan 666]

That was was I feared to do...the fact is that my RS 1.5 install is hugely customized and I would leave this solution as a last hope...

I get furious when things like this happen!! It worked perfectly, I made a recovery of the main partition...and bingo, RS didn't work anymore with same shortcut, same target line, same everything!!!

[TheAeneas]

This is probably a stupid question of me to ask, but anyway...
You say that only the primary partition was stuffed and you reformatted it? (and in doing so reinstalled your OS?) then attached your mobile drive and attempted to execute the game?
I assume that after the OS install, Rome was reinstalled? (To a different place, not to your existing RS folder on your mobile drive.) Keep in mind that if you are using a "clean" OS that the registry wont have the relevant info about Rome and it will not function correctly. (Therefore it could potentially have nothing to do with the integrity of your current RS folder on your mobile drive.)
Reinstalling Rome can be a pain, but it would be a pity if it was installed to the original location and overwrote your existing heavily modified version and then you lost everything.
Then again, I could be smoking my socks because I dont really know anything...

[Spartan 666]

no, RTW has the good thing to perfectly work even if it is not installed by just copy\pasting the install folder...I've done this lots of times and always worked...then, Roma Surrectum install is in the secondary partition, while a new RTW install (with lots of mods) is in the primary partition...mods from the fresh install work, RS doesn't. but that's strange because I had already done a thing like this, and it worked without trouble...