Computer Emergency! Can a particion be recovered?

Factual Questions
1

I don’t know what I did, but I did something.

I have 3 hardrives on ym system. The first one is an 80 gig hardrive with the OS. That seems ot be working fine. The second drive is a 160 gig drive, I appear to have deleted the particion on the drive while doing a fresh install of windows XP. And for some reason, my 3rd drive a 200 gig drive is not being recognized by windows anymore. Any time I try to read it, it prompts me to format it. I tried using the software that came with it to see what was wrong, but it says it’s fine, though it reports the particion to be FAT 32, which it isn’t, it’s definately NTFS.

So how can I restore my drives? Are there any utilities to recover lost particions?

<— About to have a fit, specially if my SO finds out I’ve lost all our pics and mp3s :frowning: Help please!

2

Wow, I’m so distressed that I misspelled partition through that whole post. :smack:

3

my first thought is that perhaps your install of XP isn’t configured to use LBA. Check out this MS KB article on how to enable LBA.

Hopefully that will help. I had to do something similar when I installed my 160 GB drives on Windows 2000.

4

If you haven’t actually written to the drives, then all of your data should still be there. It’s a matter of finding / rebuilding your partition information.

Don’t do anything foolish :wink: If this was a unix system I’d be better able to answer right away. Let me do a little digging and I’ll see what I can come up with.

But in the meantime, remain calm and whatever you do, DO NOT format those drives/partitions.

5

Thanx Earthworm Jim you’ve given me hope. And I;m glad I checked in, 'cause I was about to give up and reformat.

What I’ve tried so far is updating my ATPI drivers to support large drives. That didn’t work. :frowning:

6

I’ve sent you some email - this may take a while, but don’t give up hope just yet :slight_smile:

7

email received and sent, Thanks!

8

There are lots of utilities available to do this sort of thing. Try searching file utilities in Tucows (or even the Google ads at the bottom of this page). A lot of the stuff on ToCows is freeware or try-before-buy shareware. I used GetDataBack with about 99% success when a HDD on my old computer fried its circuit board, but note that this comes in separate FAT and NTFS versions and is moderately expensive.

9

There are some free utilities too, but I wanted to try them out first before making any recommendations. Specifically, I’m thinking of TestDisk

No reason to run out & spend gobs of cash if you don’t need to :slight_smile:

10

I’ve had good luck with Recover It All from DTI Data. This may not be the best option, since it’s $99 for the version that will actually recover your data and I think there are cheaper options out there, but the demo version will scan your HD for partition records and list the files it finds. This could be a simple way to see that your data is still there. One nice thing about the this program is you don’t have to install it, as it’s just a single executable, so it doesn’t clutter up your system. One bad thing is that the user interface is a little hard to figure out.

11

Well, I don’t know if you fixed it on your own or what :wink:

But anyway, download TestDisk

I deleted a partition with ~5000 files, and created a new partition over top of the old one. Using TestDisk I got everything back. I suspect you deleted your old partitions when windows was reinstalled, which is pretty much what I tested.

Let me know if you need any help figuring out how to use TestDisk. Good luck!!