Deleted Partition

[LenzilT]

I was running three partitions on my computer, XP Home, XP Pro (Installed in that order) and a third that I used to back up files to aswell as an area on unpartitioned space. The hard drive went wrong for some reason, corupted the master boot files and couldnt be repaired, so I bought a new hard drive, reinstalled XP Home and connected both hard drives to the motherboard. All has been well, I managed to recover almost everything I thought I lost, even the encripted files from XP Pro (By changing the boot drive in the CMOS), untill I started playing round with the partitions, I decided to delete the partitions on the old hard drive to use it as a single large backup drive. So I deleted the old BackUp partition and then the XP Home one,straight away I realised it wasnt a good idea as XP Home had all the master boot files on it. Now when I boot from the new hard drive, XP Home trys to run scan disc on the old hard drive and it comes up with "Corupt Master File Table - scan disc aborted". Is there any way of recovering the seven months worth of dockets so I can fill in my tax return properly........? The XP Pro partition is still on the hard drive,but when I try and access it from the new XP Home it just says "G:\ is not accessable. The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable".
Would reinstalling XP Home on the old hard drive on a partition and then trying to repair XP Pro from the XP Pro cd work? I would try it but dont want to risk damaging anything any more than I have if theres a chance to recover the contents of the XP Pro partition.

 

[bcastner]

Hmmmm, try this first: Boot from the XP CD, at the Welcome Screen hit F10, and choose the Repair Option to run the Recovery Console.

Then execute FIXMBR

You could also boot with a Win9x disk that had FDISK on it and type FDISK /MBR

If no joy from that see this article:

http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q249/3/21.ASP&NoWebContent=1

 

[linney]

More information here.

314503 - Computer Stops Responding with a Black Screen When You Start Windows

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314503&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

Data Recovery.

http://www.restorer2000.com

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

 

[LenzilT]

bcastner, tryed both ways you said,sadly after a couple of hours I wasnt getting anywhere, so checked on here again and tryed the links provided by linney, the restorer2000 app didnt want to recover from the corupted partition, however, I then tryed 'GetDataBack for NTFS' v2.17, and it worked absolutely perfect, now I can recover EVERYTHING this time before playing with partitions.
Many thanks

Greg

 

[rstumbaugh]

LenzilT,

where did you get a copy of getdataback for ntfs? It seems like a great product but awfully expensive for just one partition restore.