Recovering a Lost Partition

  • Thread starter Thread starter Josh
  • Start date Start date
J

Josh

I was installing XP on my computer again and some stupid
reason i deleted both partions on each HDD. Now i have
lost over 2 years work in tax returns. Is there anyway
for me to recover this lost info. I delted it in the xp
setup. Please help ill busy for a long long time if i
have to start over.

Thanks
 
Josh said in news:[email protected]:
I was installing XP on my computer again and some stupid
reason i deleted both partions on each HDD. Now i have
lost over 2 years work in tax returns. Is there anyway
for me to recover this lost info. I delted it in the xp
setup. Please help ill busy for a long long time if i
have to start over.

Thanks
Click to expand...

I can't remember which, but maybe it was MBRtool or MBRwork had an
option to scan the drive to guess at the start of partitions and
recreate the partition table in the MBR. If you know exactly the size
of the partitions, you could try recreating them at the same size again.
You would be making the partition table match up with the partitions
that are still there (but just no longer defined in the partition
table). However, I would not recommend trying to boot to them after
defining the "new" partitions (to hopefully match the old partitions).
Instead boot using bootable floppy. If they were FAT partitions, you
could tell if you can see files on the recreated partitions. If they
used NTFS, you'll need a bootable floppy with an NTFS driver (NTFSINFO,
for example).

Recreating the partitions this way (by redefining them to be the exact
same size and starting on the same cylinder as before) doesn't restore
the boot sector of each partition which, I believe, does get wiped when
the partition is deleted. So you might not be able to boot those
partitions, and if you didn't define them exactly as before then booting
could cause file corruption.

A Google search on "recover lost partition" will show several utilities
available, like
http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/39103/39103.html which
mentions Ontrack's EasyRecovery (http://www.ontrack.com/software/).
While they may scan and guess at the start of partitions, and guess at
their type (NFTS, FAT32, whatever), I don't how good they are at
rebuilding the boot sector of a partition. But since you are after the
data, you don't need a boot sector. Make your partition-deleted drive
your slave drive, install a new master drive, install the same version
of Windows on the new master drive, use the method or tools to try to
recover the deleted partitions, and read only those files from the
recovered partitions. The cost of another hard drive sounds minimal
compared to the value of your data.
 
Prepare to spend a lot of time or pay a lot of money!. Go to www.ontrack.com
and look at their recovery software.

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard :-)
 
Josh said:
I was installing XP on my computer again and some
stupid reason i deleted both partions on each HDD.
Click to expand...

What does that mean? How many HDDs do you have? How many partitions on
each? What file system (FAT32/NTFS)? Did you go through with reinstalling
XP? If so, which partition? (IOW, have you overwritten the partitions
which had the lost data on them?)

If you merely deleted the partitions and haven't overwritten that space yet
(leaving it as unallocated disk space), there's a fairly good chance the
partitions can be recovered. You can find a number of options if you do a
google search on "partition recovery", but the chances of recovery drop
dramatically if you've written anything to the space.
 
Josh said:
I was installing XP on my computer again and some stupid
reason i deleted both partions on each HDD. Now i have
lost over 2 years work in tax returns. Is there anyway
for me to recover this lost info. I delted it in the xp
setup. Please help ill busy for a long long time if i
have to start over.

Thanks
Click to expand...

Try this- pc inspector
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm
-max


--
Programs that I use and recommend (all are free)
Many thanks to all the people who make these fine products!
Spybot Search and Destroy 1.3
http://www.safer-networking.org/
Spyware Blaster
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Ad-Aware
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/
Sygate Personal Firewall
http://soho.sygate.com/products/spf_standard.htm
Avast! For Home
http://www.avast.com/i_idt_1016.html
Eraser 5.3
http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/
CwShredder
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HijackThis
http://www.spychecker.com/program/hijackthis.html
Thunderbird
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
Firefox
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

This message is virus free as far I can tell
Change nomail.afraid.org to neo.rr.com so you can reply
(nomail.afraid.org has been set up specifically for
Use in Usenet. Feel free to use it yourself.)
 
Josh said in news:[email protected]:
Click to expand...

The least expensive solution to your problem is a program called
DFSee, available at WWW.DFSee.com The software is fully functional
as downloaded, so if you know what you're doing, you wouldn't have to
register, BUT It's complicated to use. The $50 registration gets you
personal instructions from the software author explaining what to do.
Since all you've done is erased the partition information, it probably
won't be too difficult to get your data back. I had one of the IBM
drives that failed. I had tried some of the easier recovery programs
available on the web, but they wouldn't access the failed drive.
DFSee would access it. DFSee was able to clone the corrupted data to
a good hard drive and do my recovery on the good drive.



RWL


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