Deleted Partition - HELP!!! 1

[umhguy]

I did something stupid (As usual). I have a 200 gig external usb hdd. I was reinstalling windows on the pc its connected to and managed to delete the partition that the external drive was on. Not realizing this after windows is reinstalled i create a new partition on the drive (I did NOT format, just made the partition). Realizing this after the fact i stopped what i was doing.

I installed Partition Magic 8.01 and had it do an "undelete partition" but it found none. I have Partition Table Doctor running now to search for lost partitions.

Here's my question. Is there any chance whatsoever i'm getting that partition back? If not, is there any chance i can still get my data back off the drive?

Thanks a million for anyone that can give some insight.

-J

 

[smah]

You can find numerous discussions like this in forum528
I DELETED an ACTIVE partition and LOST MY DATA!! HELP ME!! thread528-1169400

 

[linney]

The less writing done to the drive the better your chances of recovering data.

If what you have done so far is correct I'd say your chances are better than most who have faced similar situations.

These are the most commonly recommended recovery programs seen on this site.

PC Inspector

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

Plenty of other recovery software listed here.

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Disk_Management/Error_Checking_and_Repair/

http://www.restorer2000.com

http://www.runtime.org/hints.htm

Perhaps you could even write a new MBR to the drive with Fdisk and run ScanDisk to fix errors, who knows?

Good luck anyway.

 

[dglienna]

I don't see how you were installing windows on an external drive, unless windows was always on that drive before, and you were booting to it. If you deleted the partition that windows was on, and it wasn't on the external drive, then that data should be OK. I've made a mistake in the past installing Windows, which saw a drive that I had disabled in BIOS. It was internal, but said it was Drive 0, instead of Drive 1. It formatted the wrong one. I don't see how that would happen in your case though.

-David
2006 Microsoft Valueable Professional (MVP)

 

[umhguy]

During the intiall windows install prompts, it listed my usb hard drive (Which is nothing but a giant 200gb partition used for backups) as drive0 and marked it as c: which was totally incorrect. I realized this after i deleted the partition (didn't format it).

I wound up using GetDataBack for NTFS from runtime.org. It worked like a champ! Not a single file was lost. Restored ("copied") the files back to another disk in my system then formatted the usb drive, and copied it all back.

Thanks Liney!

 

[alidabiri]

you can also try file recovery tools from here. it's got good rating and it's shareware. it supports FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, IDE, SCSI, ATA:

http://www.pctools.com/file-recover/

 

[PRPhx]

You should also think about backing up your important files to cd/dvd BEFORE you attempt a reinstall. That way, it's so much easier to copy from cd/dvd back to your hd. Then put the media away, out of harms way until you need it again.