Hard drive lost partition

[withanh]

I have a 500GiB hard drive that apparently lost one of its partitions. When I look at it using Paragon Partition Manager, it shows it as free space.

The user was trying to resize the Win7 partition with Paragon Partition Manager to make room for Ubuntu 9.10, it told her that it could not run in an x64 environment and to boot to the CD to resize the partition. When she booted to the CD, she says it only showed the 100MiB partition, and the rest showed as free space.

Is there any way to rebuild the partition table so I can access the data and at least pull her data off before I toss the hard drive? I'm concerned that if I just create a new partition it will wipe what's there, I'd like to be able to recover the data if at all possible.

Thanks!

h

 

[Lemon13]

http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm?Language=1

M. Knorr

MCSE, MCTS, MCSA, CCNA

 

[withanh]

I'm downloading and testing now. I'll let you know later this afternoon.

Thanks for posting that link!

h

 

[withanh]

Unfortunately that did not work. It apparently only supports up to XP and the FAQ specifically says no to Vista.

I installed on an XP machine and connected my Win7 hard drive. It sees the drive but when I try to scan it it first gives me an "NT_read error/error no.21/drv:129 LBA:0 blocks:1" with Abort/Retry/Ignore. Ignore makes no difference. After this I tell it to look at drive #2 (the bad drive) and click on Find logical drives... and it returns "Invalid floating point operation." I'm thinking it's because it doesn't understand the NTFS version that Win7 uses.

Any other ideas? Anyone else?

 

[Freestone]

Not free, but GetDataBack has been used successfully by many forum members, including myself. It has a trial version which will let you see what it thinks it can recover. Be aware there are separate versions for FAT32 and NTFS

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-products.htm

 

[kjv1611]

Active Partition Recovery has a free version as well as a paid version. The paid version, if I remember correctly, will restore in place, where the free version will repair to a new location.

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"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me