help with recovering lost partition please?

hi all. i'm hoping you guys and your experience can help me out with quite an urgent problem i am having no luck in solving or finding an answer to.

my story is this:
my setup is windows vista. my original disk setup was an 80gb drive split into a 15gb partition for vista, a 5gb partition that holds apache web server, i then had a (roughly) 60gb drive for all my stuff.

so i was trying to install ubuntu linux, so i used windows disk management to shrink the 60gb volume to make a little space - it worked fine, i tried the linux install but for whatever reason it didn't take. i used the vista dvd to repair the mbr and get vista running, and on returning to windows found a bunch of small partitions in disk management this time. i deleted one, figuring that as it was new it was not connected to any of the other partitions however the second i deleted that volume my 60gb drive/partition vanished.

this 60gb was then showing as 'unallocated space'.

in acronis disk director 10 i ran the recovery expert and in both manual and automatic mode but it does not show the deleted partition/unallocated space - then in possibly a worse move of desperation i used windows vista disk management to create a 'new simple volume' from this unallocated space in the vain hope it would recreate the volume that was on there but the volume is now showing as 'raw' disk space (i didn't format the volume).

can anyone tell me in as much detail as possible what i should be doing in acronis disk director suite 10 to turn this 'raw' format partition back into a working 'ntfs' partition please?

 

suishide:

Were the three original partitions all primary?
Were all three created by Vista Disk Management?
What type(s) of partitions did you create when installing Ubuntu?

If you ever had a primary partition located between logical partitions then Vista Disk Management gets confused and won't display the true layout. If that was the case then it probably did not do the right thing when making changes to a mixed layout.

Another problem that can arise is mixing partitions created with Vista's new partitioning rules with partitions created by older partitioning tools like Acronis Disk Director or the partitioner used by Ubuntu. Using Vista Disk Management to modify a partition created by Ubuntu or vice-versa can sometimes lead to problems, including the loss of one or more partitions.

I think your best bet at the moment is to try running Acronis Recovery Expert again, but it doesn't sound hopeful. At least you didn't format the 60 GB partition, so there may be a slim hope that the recovery expert can locate the former NTFS partition and fix it.

I fear though that you may end up needing to reformat the partition and start over. If it comes to this you can use Vista Disk Managment to format the new partition as NTFS and then copy your data back. I hope that you have a backup of the data that used to be on the partition.

 

success!

after trying about half a dozen pieces of software, the one that actually did it for me is called 'getdataback for ntfs' - the interface was quite basic but it pulled up the contents of my missing drive and it seems to have recovered all 40gb+ undamaged. *wipes brow*

i'm not sure if this could've been resolved using acronis' software because i'm unfamiliar with what it can do in terms of recovery but i just thought i should put that 'getdataback' name out there for anyone else that might be in a similar position so that they have other options to try.

thanks for your help though.

 

suishide:

Great! A couple of forum members have mentioned GetDataBack before. Nice to know that it did the job for you.