Help! Deleted External HDD Partition! Can I recover?

[ImagoX]

Hey, I need help badly... While helping my mom reload her computer with win XP, I inadvertantly purged the hard disk partition for my external hard drive (long story, needless to say DAMN MICROSOFT for mislabeling my EXTERNAL drive as "C" when I went through setup... why, God, why??).

So anyway, now when I connect my hard drive it thinks it needs to be refoamatted. It only deleted the partition formatting- I'm pretty sure and did not overwrite any of the data, and I NEED IT because I sent her backup files to the external disc prior to installing XP! Is there ANY way to restore the partition WITHOUT overwriting/deleting the files on the drive?????? Naturally, if I DO reformat then any data on the drive WILL be gone forever.

ANY help would be greatly appreciated! Please get back to me ASAP if you have anything I can use. Thanks a million in advance!

 

[bcastner]

boot from the XP CD and enter the Recovery Console.

At the prompt enter FIXMBR

 

[ImagoX]

I tried that, but the Recovery Console only let me select the Windows load on the C: drive, and not the partition on the EXTERNAL hard drive that I am needing to repair.

I inadvertantly deleted the partition on my Maxtor EXTERNAL HDD (USB) because when I initially booted the PC from the XP Pro installation disc it for some reason IDs the EXTERNAL USB drive as "C:", and I told it to delete the partition in preperation to a full reformat and install of XP. Of course, right after I did that I realized the volume label was WAY to large to be the internal HDD in the PC, but by that point it was too late- I'd already zapped the partition. I successfully reformatted the PC's INTERNAL drive and installed WinXP, but now I need to somehow pull this daa off the external HDD. I have NOT reformatted the external HDD yet- whrn I plug it in WinXP can see it OK and tell me it needs to be formatted (since I zapped the volume I'm sure)..

I see that there are some software packages out there that advertise that they can recover the data. Can anyone recomend one that will work for ths scenario?

 

[ImagoX]

For what it's worth, I've tried SEVERAL "data recovery" apps like EasyRecovery and R-Studio and they just churn the drive for hours without even reading any files whatsoever... Am I screwed here?

 

[chrismay]

ImagoX,
I did the exact same thing on the same day(same sceneriao except it was my whife's PC). I found several apps on the web that should work, but they all run $150 or more, and I am still debating if the data I had is worth that. Did you find any solution that worked?

Thanks

Chris

 

[chrismay]

Try this thread, a similar problem with a solution,

thread751-507608

I just downloaded several packages, I will post if any work

good luck

Chris

 

[gregbaird]

I did exactly the same thing and used R-Studio NTFS. I got back the data I was crying over, namely my palm pilot data. If the drive was formated as fat32 then I'd recommend R-Studio Fat.

Hope you got the data back. I Deleted a folder on my mums HDD which had a book she was writing on it. I was able to use a norton utility called unerase which comes with Norton utilities. This won't fix the deleted partition though.

 

[mijan]

There are a number of usefull recovery tools on the internet, but some are crap and can write to the disk and destroy your data. Care is required !.

Try

http://www.computer-recovery.com

if in doubt, they are good at recovering data and have been very good in the past when i was in a similar crisis.

 

[mainegeek]

ImagoX,
What your saying doesn't make sense. Get your mothers pc up and running with XP first, then attach the external drive and verify wether or not it still has data on it.