Hard Disk Manager 8.5SE lost partitions

Hi,

I have a Western Digital 500Gb external USB hard disc which was not being assigned a drive letter when connected to my laptop but was when connected to a computer at work. So, it appears that it is the Windows XP (with SP3) setup on the laptop that is the problem.

I have given up on fiddling with Windows and my workaround was to use Hard Disc Manager SE 8.5 to set up and assign drive letters to five NTFS partitions. This allowed me to fully access the external disc within a given session - but the drive letters were ‘lost’ on closing down the laptop and had to be reassigned with HDM when it was restarted (a pain but ok for occasional access).

I successfully moved my data files to one of the new partitions.

My second and fatal step was to copy the contents (system and programs) on C drive (15.6Gb files / 45.6 Gb capacity) to another of the partitions on the external drive. The wizard required a restart of the laptop and on completion the entire external drive now appears to be a single volume with no partitions or file system and with 2048 (!) Gb capacity and 466 Gb free space.

I have used the Undelete Partition Wizard to look at the external hard disc and it identifies only a ‘deleted’ NTFS partition with 15.6Gb used and 45.6 Gb capacity. It looks as though this is the copy of the C drive which I could potential recover using ‘undelete’.

My question is – are the data files also likely to be still in a recoverable state in a lost partition on the external hard disc? (I am happy to lose the copy of the C drive if need be). If so, what is likely to be the best way to recover them?

 

It is possible that the data is still recoverable, if the copied C partition did not directly overwrite it, meaning that if that copy was to the same location on the disk as the previous data, then it is more then likely lost. What you can do is scan the hard disk for files using an un-delete utility, if they weren't overwritten during the copy then they should be found intact.

You should be careful when creating multiple partitions on external disk drives, Windows sometimes has trouble reading the partition table information for additional partitions.

What likely happened is that after the reboot to complete the operation, the partitions were again unmounted, causing problems during the copy.