Partition Recovery

Hi there,
I've reinstalled Windows XP and somewhere along the line one of my partitions - the one with all my work on - has disappeared. I have two seperate hard disks and the partition table seems to have been erased for the second one (the one without the OS, and with my work).

I've used Acronis to try to find the partitions again, and it found the other partitions on the disk, just not the one with all my work on! It also saw the disk size as much less than it actually is (the disk is a Maxtor 200GB DiamondMax 9 but Acronis sees it as 132GB).

I've also run Findpart and that shows an error over this sector. I'm fast running out of ideas and I can't afford to lose that data.

Does anyone have any ideas??!

Thanks,

Jan

 

Hi,

Sorry to hear about your problems.

Might be a long shot in the dark but, could you put this HD into another PC in the slave position, and examine it from the boot HD, try and see if anything shows up. If it does you should be able to copy it across to a New folder on the boot HD and save whatever possible, then burn it to a CD/DVD etc.

Failing that you could Undelete/Recovery software maybe.

After that if you're still having problems with the original HD, you could try fdisk/partion/reformat/reinstall, always works for me.


StevieO

 

Before applying any partition recovery tool, try examining the hdd with a utility such as HDTune. If there are errors on the surface, in particular in the area where partition info is stored, you won't probably get lucky with partition recovery only. I would advise you to use either (or both) HDDRegen or Spinrite. The former allows you to correct one sector at a time. There is no demo version for spinrite.

Then, after your hdd has been processed by these utilities, you can try a partition recovery tool, such as the one included with bootitNG (terabyteunlimited).

Best of luck.

 

TestDisk is the most powerful utility i have ever used(Plus it's free). The interface isn't as simple as others metioned, though it has not failed me in helping others yet.

 

i used testdisk once to recover a partition. it's a great program.
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=96021