Possble to recover data from a deleted partition?

[AndrewG1976]

Hi,

I know this is a hopeless question but is it possible to recover data (files) from a deleted partition?

The reason I ask is today the IBM hard disk on my generic brand PIII packed it in. I tried to repair it using an IBM hard disk sector repair utility but this didn't work. Then I tried to reinstall WinNT 4.0 Server but it would never boot up.

One dumb act led to another and I ended up deleting the C drive partition from WinNT setup. The drive was never formatted so I assume the data is still there, just inaccessible.

Now when I go into WinNT setup it shows:

C: Unformatted or Damaged 29314 MB

Am I SOL?

 

[TravTrav]

sounds like a lost cause, but have you tried slaving the hard drive and putting it on another computer to see whats on it? Also, there are numerous file recovery programs out there, you may want to try one of those if the disk doesnt show anything....

 

[Claudek]

Not a lost cause at all. As mentioned there are many software which can recover data by examining at the sector level. Basically you take that disk and put in another machine and let the software check it out for you.

I have used GetDataBack which you can checkout at

http://www.runtime.org/

to get data from a disk that had been reformated and then had another OS installed on it afterwards. Got basically all the data I needed - you'd be amazed how much you can recover.

You may want to check out other recovery software, for eg at

http://www.webattack.com/Shareware/system/swdatarecovery.shtml

Good Luck.



Claudius (What certifications??)

http://www.iteq.com.au

 

[AndrewG1976]

Thanks four your reply Claudius.

I want to recover an entire partition which has 20GB of files on it, rather than recover the files one by one.

I found this great tool called "Active@ Partition Recovery" which does just this but could only get the demo version of it which let's you view the lost partition/files but not recover them, what a tease!

Instead I'm using "Stellar Phoenix FAT and NTFS Recovery" to recover the files individually. All 20GB of it. I've got back 15GB so far so not long to go!