Deleted partition on backup drive

[slimeruk]

I was running XP pro on my computer on a 20gig and fell foul to a virus which corrupted so many of my exe files I decided it was time to upgrade to a 160gig hard drive I had left over.

After wiping the virus I fresh installed W2k Pro on the 160gig, I switched the 20gig as a slave drive.

While doing this I punched away at the buttons and accidently deleted the single partition on my 20gig (containing all my photos etc...) I had backed up most of the files (emails etc) on a networked computer we have, but wasn't expecting to make such a stupid mistake.

I have used all of the freeware/shareware programs I could find and most just result in errors, however using PC Inspectors File recovery it found all my files, but due to the limitations of the demo I was unable to retrieve any of them, but I know they are all there.

The drive was not showing on W2k at all, but was shown in my devices list.

My thought was to re-partition that drive so started up using W2k and allocated the drive a partition covering the full 20gig, now the drive shows in windows but tells me to format the drive and still none of the recovery programs I have tried will get these back.

Does anyone know how I might configure the partition/boot sector to 'see' the files contained?

Any other suggestions more than welcome.

Both drives are NTFS

Thanks in advance.

 

[wolluf]

You can't (configure the partition/boot sector to 'see' the files contained)

All you can do is try more data recovery apps - you'll probably have to pay for one (PC Inspector is the only free one I know about - though I haven't made a real attempt to look for some time). Couple recommended on tek tips

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

http://www.webattack.com/get/filescavenger.html

Google will find you lots more.

Good luck1

 

[diogenes10]

I do not know this for a fact, but my concern would be that the more tinkering you do with your file and partition structures, the more you will put your data at risk. If you read some of the posts from people who have failed harddrives and are looking at thousands of dollars to get their info back, I would think you would consider yourself fortunate to have a working harddrive and a problem that a relatively inexpensive data recovery application could help with.

Sometime ago when I was looking, I believe I saw the Acronis software line including a program that talked about partition recovery as well as file recovery. Not something I have used personally-the vendor writeup would be all I could pass on about it.

-------------------------------------
It's 10 O'Clock ( somewhere! ).
Are your registry and data backed up?

 

[jjrocker]

I am working on a unit the lady had 2 61.5gb hard drives on a motherboard with 4 ide controller input plugs the motherboard went bad all the capacitors are swelled up and the unit locks up and shutsdown before desktop. My problem is her bad mobo had a HIGH POINT RAID CONTROLLER. i ordered a rocker raid 100 pci raid controller to match the raid chip onboard the bad motherboard. i Can see the RAID array and the HIGH POINT BIOS tells me the boot drive and see's the array so all that I think is OK. BUt when I boot
I see it find the Dual harddrives then says NTLDR MISSING.
I am running windows XP HOME SP1. I think I have a corrupt partition or bootsector. Any advise or programs I can get to help me recover the partition or boot sectors.
A demo I have of ACTIVE PArtition recovery I have see's all the data on the drives but the demo doesn't fix anything or even tell me if iT see's a problem. i MAY BE ON THE WRONG TRACK HERE BUT IT STOPS AT "NTLDR MISSING PUSH ANY KEY TO RESTART" Also when I look at the data on the drive I see NTLDR on the Boot drive

 

[wolluf]

jjrocker - you should start a new thread for your problem.