lost partition appears as unformatted space

[ProphetZarquon]

Is it possible to recover a lost partition (appears as unformatted space) within the same space it occupied?

I am running WinXP Pro on my C: drive (12 gigs), with D: E: and F: set up from a 200gig secondary drive.

WinXP Pro is running fine.

When my F: drive ran out of space, I opted to use the free space on D: and E: to enlarge the F: partition.

Well PQ Partition Magic 8 was not installed on that machine, so like a fool, I launched it from a drive on the network.

Everything seemed to be working fine, until the machine froze. Now I have seen PM take a LOOOONG time to complete it's work, so I left for an hour or so. When I returned, the PC had restarted and PM8 had NOT completed it's work.

The F: drive now appears only as Unformatted space! WinXP Pro can see the drive, but cannot access it unless I choose to format. NO! Partition Magic does not offer any recovery options for unformatted space.

I do not have 50gigs free anywhere else to clone this partition to, and I don't have $400 for Active@ File Recovery. If I did, I would take this to a professional recovery service.

Is there any way I can recover the de-formatted partition to it's original location?

 

[nipester]

You need a utility that can scan the 200 gig hard drive for an older copy of the MFT. Heres a few to try that appear to be free or really cheap:

http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Search/partition.html

 

[ProphetZarquon]

None of those seem to be capable of recovering from a partition which appears as RAW (no allocation tables). The system can only offer to format the drive. Most of this software in fact assumes that you have a new partition installed. I don't want to do that because it will damage the data I want to recover.

 

[FredMertz]

What you want does not come without a price.

If you have money, send it to the pros and they will recover it.

If you have the space, recover all the data using a recovery utility ($100 max for the ones that you can afford and will work in most cases), then rebuild the partition and copy back.

There is no way to really rebuild a partition on that RAW area that will "bring you back" to your old state. Spare 40Gb drives are going for $30 after rebate, and a 200Gb Western Dig can be had for $90 after rebate. If things are so tight you can't afford either... I have to ask what's so valuable on that hard drive?

 

[ProphetZarquon]

Hours and hours and hours of studio time, plus all my personal files.

 

[offthecuff]

I am looking for the same thing and have found ONTRACK has a program that can see files on an unformatted drive. cost is around $100.00 I am looking for cheaper free is great.

 

[Brona]

Hi,

I think you can find Active@ Partition Recovery tool quite useful. It is really capable of restoring it. It helped me before, so check it out!

http://www.partition-recovery.com/

 

[terrytree]

Hello,

You can try using Data Recovery tool - DataRecoveryWizard to restore data. IT has some really great algorithms.

http://www.easeus.com/