Partition recovery

Hi there,
McTavish,if you're here,this is right up your alley.
I managed to delete the partition on my primary drive. I have installed another h/d and put windows xp on it. I purchased partition manager and installed it. The drive was NTFS. I used a boot floppy and fdisk to delete the partition,then create a new partition(dos). It has not been formatted. I'm using another computer now so I can work on it and check back here. I use AIM and MSN messenger. Both are Blufx IDs. I'm worried I may lose everything if I dont have someone hold my hand through this.


Mark

 

Hi Mark. If you have created a new partition that has the same starting position on the hard drive as the one you want to recover, then you may be out of luck.

When you delete a partition all you actually do is remove its details from the partition table, but all the information defining the partition itself is still there in the sectors that were the first few sectors of that partition. When Partition Manager looks for lost partitions it searches the hard drive for these few sectors, then rebuilds the partition table using this information so that the bios and operating system can recognise it again. You can do various things to a lost partition and still recover it, but those first few sectors have to be untouched. If you create a new partition in the same place as the deleted partition then these first few sectors will be over written with the new partition’s information, usually making the original partition unrecoverable.

However Partition Manager is good and I’m not sure that just a DOS partition will have done unrecoverable damage. I’m assuming you now have the hard drive set as slave and have Partition Manager in Windows on the master drive? If that’s correct then use PM to delete all current partitions on the slave hard drive until it is showing as all free space. Then right click on the graphic bar display of this free space and choose Undelete from the menu. If it fails to find your original partition the first time then check the box to scan all sectors and try again – it will take much longer. If still no joy then you can try the Undelete Wizard, which will give you further options on the type of partition you are trying to recover.

If it still fails to find your partition then I’m afraid your only option will be file recovery software to try and get some of your data back. Of you could try some other partition recovery apps, but I would doubt they would have any better success.

 

I tried to undelete the partition using PM but it found nothing. I rebooted and tried again telling it to scan all sectors and PM does nothing. Is it time to use data recovery software now, or is there something else I can try?

Mark

 

It may be worth trying the Wizard as you can select to search for just NTFS partitions. Then work your way through all the other search criteria.

Unfortunately I can’t offer anything else. Perhaps an expert might be able to manually rebuild the partition, but alas that is a bit beyond me.

You will have to decide what your data is worth to see how much you are willing to spend. File recovery software ranges from free to ludicrously expensive. As with everything I would guess you get what you pay for. You could send the drive to a specialist who will probably do the best job. The only free software I know of at the moment is this one. http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm But there may be others.

The best mid-priced one I’ve used is this one http://www.runtime.org but I can’t really say if it’s the best for the price. There is a demo you can use just to see what the full version may be able to recover. There are literally dozens of similar file recovery apps around at about the same price, so if your data is worth it you should do some research.

 

I have Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro. I don't really know how it rates as far as what you get for the money. It was given to me. I'm looking now at what it found and my options from this point. Thanks for the help. I'll be posting back to keep you informed.

Mark

 

That one is several times out of my price range so I’ve never tried it. However I would suspect it should do the job. Good luck.

 

Well,my partition and data recovery efforts turned out a disaster. Using Partition Manager and OnTrack Easy Recovery didn't help me in this mess. I managed to save a few pictures and a lot of useless stuff. I was able to get most of it back because I had put some on cds and other computers I have here. My thanks to McTavish.

Mark

 

Greetings,
You can try data recovery software: Partition Table Doctor or EASEUS DataRecoveryWizard.
These tools helped me, so give it a try. Really awesome soft!

 

terrytree, Thanks for that info. I'll check it out and hope I don't have to use it.

Mark