Recover deleted partition

balkieb2002

I accidently deleted a partiton thru windows xp setup (i deleted the wrong one) which contained alot of stuff i wanted to keep (over 20gigs of stuff).
is there anyway possible to recover this lost partition/information or is it all gone?

Khannie

Totally possible, though you may not get it /all/ back. I'm sure others will recommend recovery tools (ginganinja, you around?). I'll just put your mind at ease quickly.

balkieb2002

No iirc as i was installing in onto another partition, so would have just deleted it with any other installation. i'm currently looking round the net for progs but no luck with them so far.

Gryzor

this might be a bit pricy...€90...but this got me out of a big hole in the past....an 80GB hole.....it got me every byte of it back....

i've used it to recover data from a machine that was reghosted aswell..

linkage

zuma

Get Acronis Disk Director!!!!!


Something similar happened to me and I tried out a couple of other far more specialised programs with no luck but Acronis DiskDirector sorted it out in about a minute with no data loss.

Give me a PM if you want...ahemmm...directions on use!

balkieb2002

It seems my problem was worse than i first anticipated.

I deleted a partion on that disk earlier this morning through partition magic on purpose as i wanted to wipe the hard disk to use it as a storage drive (which i did and then created a new partition on it and put the files on it) and its these files which i wanted to recover.

Using a demo of a program called partition recovery it showed some files i could recover except these were from the previous partion (the one i deleted on purpose). When viewed through partition magic it now shows as unallocated space.

balkieb2002

bedlam wrote:

que?

??

Capt'n Midnight

bedlam wrote:

On the small chance you have a spare machine or external drive you can try the following

1) Download a bootable Unix distro, such as Knoppix , Helix or Knoppix STD
2) Boot machine with cd from #1

run gpart
(use man gpart to see the options to do a full scan) - takes some time , at the end of that you should have a list of potential partitions, Backup the partition table (extremely important that bit.) you could then try to write one of the guessed partitions. DO NOT USE WINDOWS to look at the new partition until you have looked at with your knoppix disk or whatever, because windows justs loves to mark it's territory (think parked cars) and you don't want the data touched until you are sure.

And you must have a backup of the partition table because sometimed the geometry is different and you have to restroe the old one to see the current partitions

balkieb2002

bedlam wrote:

Not quite understanding you previous post. Are you saying you formatted your hard drive, copied the files over to the drive, formatted again losing the files and when trying file recovery software can only see files from pre the first format?

Thats exactly what i'm saying hence my new problem

balkieb2002

I had 3 drives in my pc a 160gb, 80gb and 40gb.

the 40gb was where the files were origanlly stored. i formatted the 80gb and moved the files that were on the 40 to it. i then formatted the 40 and installed windows xp on it (this was when the deletion happend).
the 40gb was just tempory as belonged to a second pc so i'm presuming the format wiped that too espec as os is now installed on it.

bit confusing and i'm coming to the conclusion that getting anything back is a lost cause.

balkieb2002

thanks for all your help so far bedlam. really appreciated.

yeah all checks thus far on 80gb, the files were copied to root of drive on 40gb where windows was also installed. what prog would ya recommend for scanning it? i see if i can free up some space on 160gb though not likly as was gonna use the 80gb to shift some free space.

TimTim

I'd look at Steller Phonenix i've had *stellar* preformance (shoot me for that), I've used it to recover accidently deleted folders, iirc it reads the disk directly so it ignores what ever happens to be listed in the MFT (master fat table)

balkieb2002

thanks for prog trying a demo of stellar now but once again the only thing thats being recovered is the previous partion to the one i'm looking for!

still trying though.

balkieb2002

I formated and created partition of 80gb through part magic
Copied the files from 40gb to 80gb
then went into windows xp setup and formated 40 and accidently the 80gb
installed xp on the 40gb
and now presently 80gb is classified as unalloacted space.

::edit:: i'm now in shock... its seems that the program stellar phoenix has now found everything that was on the 80gb (over 50gbs of stuff from previous installations) including just about everything i was after and previously deleted stuff. I'm hoping the demo does not mess up or is limited so now all i have to is make space on the 160gb. :eek:

Padraig Mor

Gryzor wrote:

this might be a bit pricy...€90...but this got me out of a big hole in the past....an 80GB hole.....it got me every byte of it back....

i've used it to recover data from a machine that was reghosted aswell..

linkage

Another vote for Runtime's GetDataBack. Got everything back from a formatted drive with Windows re-installed for me. The demo allows you to see what you can recover before forking out to copy it to disk.