Data recovery partioning query

noviceman1

Hi,

Not sure if this is right forum, closest I could find.

I have a laptop that won't boot up, it has Vista on it. I have data that I want to restore before I go wiping and trying to restore etc... I initially connected the drive to another laptop, but it wasn't picking it up, so I messed around a little trying to get the drive working, like putting into freezer and so on. I knew it wasn't totally dead as my laptop was seeing a disk drive there, but not on Windows explorer.

So, then I used ultimate boot cd with broken laptop to see if I could recover data without really knowing what I was doing, a little knowledge and all that. So, now I have a situation where I can see the recovery partition, but the main partition has no file system, I must have cleared it of it's file system. So now I want to be able to change it back to NTFS and make it readable again without obviously damaging any of the data, I've looked at all the tools in the boot cd but can't see anything to do it. Someone with a bit more knowleldge of this than me to give input would be great.

When I connected drive back to other laptop it could see recovery drive this time, so, i'm hoping that if I can change main partition to NTFS I might pick that up also....

corkcomp

noviceman1 wrote: »

Hi,

Not sure if this is right forum, closest I could find.

I have a laptop that won't boot up, it has Vista on it. I have data that I want to restore before I go wiping and trying to restore etc... I initially connected the drive to another laptop, but it wasn't picking it up, so I messed around a little trying to get the drive working, like putting into freezer and so on. I knew it wasn't totally dead as my laptop was seeing a disk drive there, but not on Windows explorer.

So, then I used ultimate boot cd with broken laptop to see if I could recover data without really knowing what I was doing, a little knowledge and all that. So, now I have a situation where I can see the recovery partition, but the main partition has no file system, I must have cleared it of it's file system. So now I want to be able to change it back to NTFS and make it readable again without obviously damaging any of the data, I've looked at all the tools in the boot cd but can't see anything to do it. Someone with a bit more knowleldge of this than me to give input would be great.

When I connected drive back to other laptop it could see recovery drive this time, so, i'm hoping that if I can change main partition to NTFS I might pick that up also....

are you saying the main HDD partition is showing no file system? if this is the case your data is already lost

noviceman1

yes, that's what I'm saying, when i first started using boot cd, it was visible and I could see an ntfs file system and even managed to see the folders in it at one stage, but I managed to change that through my lack of knowledge, so i was just wondering was there any way of converting it back to an ntfs system again without wiping it, you obviously don't think so

Khannie

You should be able to. I've been fluting around with partitions and file systems a bit recently. I could do what you want in linux. Not really sure how to do it in windows and wouldn't necessarily advise you do down the linux route. I'm sure someone else can help though.

bonzodog2

If you can still boot the UBCD, egt a data recovery program somewhere; someone here recently suggested recuva, which is free, but I have not used it.
http://www.piriform.com/recuva
Others include GetDataBack, R-Studio, google will doubtless know more...Anyways, put one of these on USB stick or external disk. If you have lots of data to recover, you need more space to copy it to, you can't recover to the same disk, that might overwrite a file. Boot from CD, run the recovery prog from ext disk/stick. It can take a long time to scan a disk !


Step 2: Learn from the experience - have a data backup strategy for important data !