Manually edit partion table??

  • Thread starter Thread starter vince.crisler
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vince.crisler

Anyone know of a slick way to edit the partition table? Here's my
situation. As a result of a late-night mistake and trying to use my
removable hard drive on my in-laws pc, I lost the data. It was
showing up fine in device manager, but when I pulled up "Disk
Management" it asked me to initialize the disk...tried it, nothing
happened, tried again (I know..this is the point where I got that
sinking feeling in my stomach that I had just screwed up)

I tried to restore the partition using testdisk, but due to the fact
that I hit that darn button twice, it couldn't fix it.

Best I can gather, without spending lots of money on a data
restoration program, I need to be able to edit the partition table to
tell the drive where to look for the information that is currently
there....any ideas?!?

Vince
 
Anyone know of a slick way to edit the partition table? Here's my
situation. As a result of a late-night mistake and trying to use my
removable hard drive on my in-laws pc, I lost the data. It was
showing up fine in device manager, but when I pulled up "Disk
Management" it asked me to initialize the disk...tried it, nothing
happened, tried again (I know..this is the point where I got that
sinking feeling in my stomach that I had just screwed up)

I tried to restore the partition using testdisk, but due to the fact
that I hit that darn button twice, it couldn't fix it.

Best I can gather, without spending lots of money on a data
restoration program, I need to be able to edit the partition table to
tell the drive where to look for the information that is currently
there....any ideas?!?
Click to expand...



Do not attempt to edit the partition table...
as you know you should not have initialized the drive as you ended up
erasing all data.
you will need a thrid party data recovery utility at this point
 
Do not attempt to edit the partition table...
as you know you should not have initialized the drive as you ended up
erasing all data.
you will need a thrid party data recovery utility at this point
Click to expand...

The data didn't get erased though...just the partition table. Is it
not possible to just re-establish a correct partition table? It is
just a set of pointers for the computer to use to find the information
on the drive, right?
 
Anyone know of a slick way to edit the partition table? Here's my
situation. As a result of a late-night mistake and trying to use my
removable hard drive on my in-laws pc, I lost the data. It was
showing up fine in device manager, but when I pulled up "Disk
Management" it asked me to initialize the disk...tried it, nothing
happened, tried again (I know..this is the point where I got that
sinking feeling in my stomach that I had just screwed up)

I tried to restore the partition using testdisk, but due to the fact
that I hit that darn button twice, it couldn't fix it.

Best I can gather, without spending lots of money on a data
restoration program, I need to be able to edit the partition table to
tell the drive where to look for the information that is currently
there....any ideas?!?
Click to expand...

You could try DFSee: http://www.dfsee.com/dfsee/

Some features may be unavailable without registration, but if you've
registered you can even create a file that you can email to the author
and in return get a script you can run that should fix the problem.

Perce
 
The data didn't get erased though...just the partition table. Is it
not possible to just re-establish a correct partition table? It is
just a set of pointers for the computer to use to find the information
on the drive, right?
Click to expand...

Though that might be the case I'm still going to recommend a third party
utility...
the fewer changes you make to the drive...the greater the chances of a
recovery.
 
Anyone know of a slick way to edit the partition table? Here's my
situation. As a result of a late-night mistake and trying to use my
removable hard drive on my in-laws pc, I lost the data.
Click to expand...

To manually recover lost partitions, I use a combination of ptedit and
findpart. There are 16-bit and 32-bit versions of both; it sounds to me
like you'd be able to use the 32-bit versions.

Ptedit32 (from
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/) is the
easiest way to edit a partition table if you know the numbers to rebuild the
four descriptors in the table. Findpart (from
http://www.partitionsupport.com/utilities.htm) can help you get a handle on
those numbers.

This can get complicated if you have extended partitions, and gets worse the
more often you've repartitioned the disk (because repartitioning can leave
abandoned boot sectors floating around, which makes it harder to tell which
were the real boot sectors and which were old).
 
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