Am I up sh*t creek?

Fazer6

I think I'm up sh*t creek.
I have a second (500Gig) HD in my PC and it was the main HD of a PC in a previous life. It had two partitions, 40 and 460 gig. I was trying to extend the 460 gig partition to use the full disk. I deleted all the data from the 40 gig and extended, as I thought, the 460 gig to the full disk. Needless to say I never thought to backup the 460 gig before I started and now have a 500 gig HD with no data. Can the data be recovered or do I just live with the loss? In Disc Management the disc is shown as a basic disk with 465 gig unallocated?
Any help, other than the obivious 'You should have backed up the drive before you started' would be appreciated.

Fazer6.

armitage_skanks

How long did the repartition take?

Provided the partition utility wasn't physically writing zeros all over the disk then its always possible to recover some of your data.

Fazer6

Less than one second. It was very quick.
By the way, I was using Disk Management.

red dave

Would resetting windows to a previous saved state work?

Fazer6

Do you mean do a system restore?

red dave

Fazer6 wrote: »

Do you mean do a system restore?

Yeah sorry that's what i meant to say

Fazer6

Are you sure that will work?

seanp_25

System Restore won't fix this.

smokiebeverage

The partition table is all that is gone, the data is hasn't been overwritten most likely. Programs like http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk may be able to help

BostonB

red dave wrote: »

Would resetting windows to a previous saved state work?

First thing would be to stop using the drive. Otherwise you risk overwriting your old data.

I don't know, but I would doubt that system restore touches partitions.

I think you're going to need to recover the partition. I've never done it, but something like this http://www.partition-recovery.com/ seems to be along the lines of what you want. I'm not recommending that, just pointing you in that direction for a solution. Theres probably free tools that can do that. Active File Recovery and Recuva etc,

riclad

You,ll have to set that up as drive ,d,e ,f, a slave drive, and use another drive for windows,new drive, or put it into a caddy ,external drive.
if you continue to use it ,windows will write, temp files,caching files,etc over the old data,making it harder to recover.
see here http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/232360-35-which-software-recover-deleted-partition

see http://www.ptdd.com/
partition recovery software, its free.
system restore ,is no use if you repartitioned the whole drive.

Fazer6

I have a second (500Gig) HD in my PC and it was the main HD of a different PC in a previous life. It had two partitions, 40 and 460 gig. I was trying to extend the 460 gig partition to use the full 500 gigs of the disk. I deleted all the data from the 40 gig and extended, as I thought, the 460 gig to the full disk. I have restored the 40 gig partition and I can now see the 460 gig drive in Disk Management as 'Healty, Primary Partition and 'Raw'. What do I do next?

Torqay

Fazer6 wrote: »

What do I do next?

Did you run TestDisk as suggested above?

riclad

are you running windows from drive 2, or from the
original 460 gig partition ,i think you ,ll have to run one of the partition restore recovery programs,cos windows probably marked 460 partition as new/ empty.
did you just use disk management to resize the drive to 460 gig.right click 460 part ,what does it,say ,460gig free.200 free etc
is 460 partition drive c,or d.?
click on 460 part,explore,what does it say?

Fazer6

@Torqay.
Yes I have, but I don't understand the instructions.
I've found the drive/partition, but I can't follow the instructions on how to recover the partition. I don't know what are the correct options to choose to recover the drive. I'm afraid that if I choose the incorrect option(s) I'll lose all the data on the disk.

Fazer6

riclad wrote: »

are you running windows from drive 2, or from the
original 460 gig partition ,i think you ,ll have to run one of the partition restore recovery programs,cos windows probably marked 460 partition as new/ empty.
did you just use disk management to resize the drive to 460 gig.right click 460 part ,what does it,say ,460gig free.200 free etc
is 460 partition drive c,or d.?
click on 460 part,explore,what does it say?

@riclad.
I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 on the C drive.
The 460 gig partition is on a HDD that was the C&D drives of an older PC that was running Win XP on it. This is current PC has a new HDD with Win 7 on it and I used the 'old HDD' as a secondary drive, it was drives F&G, let's call it Disc 2. I was given another 320 gig HDD during the week and I installed it today, lets call it Disc 3. After the installation of Disc 3 I looked in Disk Management and I thought that I'd delete the partition on disc 2 that was called F. At that time I also managed to delete G. So now I have the following drives spread over 3 discs. I'll use the names given by disk management.
Disc 0 C: This contains Windows 7 and programme files etc.
Disc 1 G: The HDD that was installed today.
Disc 2 F:& H: drives that I screwed up.
The F: drive reads 14.65 GB NTFS, Healthy, Active, Primary Partition.
The H: drive reads 451 GB RAW, Healthy, Active, Primary Partition.
When I click on the 460 part I get an error message, H:\ is not accessible. The parameter is not correct.
From the little that I can tell, the data is still all there but I don't have a partition table.
I hope that this is of some use.

riclad

i think it says parameter not correct, it means disk,partition is not formatted,DO NOT format it.
i think this would work,

http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/
just install it, point it at partition 460,
see Recover files after partitioning error.thats part of its
capability.
you may need to point it at the drive thttp://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/help/using-easeus-partition-recovery.htmhat has part 460,and say recover partition.
see above,
see here, quote;2. In the Searching Area Setting window, you can choose a specified area to search for the lost partitions. There are four searching areas:

Search Entire Disk ; endquote

it should find lost 460 part and give you option,
,results,
do complete search, not quick search.

if it finds lost partitions,

ie 2, 460gig, and 40 ,gig,
click, PROCEED ,
that starts the actual recovery process.

FIRST, backup ,40gig partition,if thers any important data on it .

i dont know if this will work,
i never used this program,
i,m just going by the online manual.
USE IT at your own risk.
post back here , if it works,or see s the old partitions.

my advice search entire drive that has 460 part,first,
for lost partitions.
use COMPLETE search mode.


http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/help/using-easeus-partition-recovery.htm
see above.

launch program,search drive x for lost partitions,
search complete mode ,wait and see does it find em.


ie search disk 2,complete , if it finds em, click proceed,wait
it could take some time to actually recover them.

riclad

post back here after doing the search etc did it work,do you need more advice?
you are looking for lost or deleted partitions.
dont format either drive.

Fazer6

Thanks riclad, will do.

riclad

if you have a choice 1st,

just recover partition 460 , least 2nd part alone ,if you can.
you made 2 changes to partition ,so i,ve no idea if it will work,,
theres other options like testdisk, ubcd, ultimate boot disk,
which may find deleted partition.
if possible leave 40 gig part as is .
menu may say recover all lost partitions?460g, 40g, if so,click

yes ,proceed ,wait. .i just checked,
testdisk can recover lost ,or deleted partitions,

see http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/232360-35-which-software-recover-deleted-partition

heres the guide
recover deleted partition
http://www.ptdd.com/recoverdeletedpartition.htm

so it gives you a choice ,select WHICH partition to recover.
chose 460gig one.only.
click ,proceed ,wait.

PrzemoF

Gparted [1] and TestDisk [2] (it's included in gparted)

[1] http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
[2] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

riclad

testdisk is the best choice ,if the other program doesnt work,or it fails to find the partition,
see http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

looks easy to use, just dont rush it,take it step by step.
see here
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download version 6.4 ,download and install,


if you use gparted you,ll need to make a live cd,bootable cdr.

CaSCaDe711

This software (EaseUS Partition Master Home Edition) saved me a lot of hassle/time recently:

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

riclad

this might be useful,
http://www.partition-tool.com/partition-recovery-wizard/recover-repartitioned-drives.htm
as posted above,

it seems easy to use ,you may need to use manual,mode to find the 460 partition.

CaSCaDe711

OP, any luck?

Fazer6

Hello All.

I'm sorry for the delay in replying to all you posts, work and a faulty router got in the way.

I tried Test Disc and also Erasus Partition recovery. Both saw the missing partition but neither would recover it, most likely something that I was or wasn't doing correctly.
Erasus told me that the partition table was corrupted and reccommended to use Partition Table Doctor.
I used Partition Table Doctor to analyise the hard drive and recover the partition table. It took about three hours but it was worth the wait.
Thanks again to all the Boardies who took the time to look at my problem and offer a multitiude of solutions.

Best regards.

Fazer6.