Partition blown up

I've just lost a partition in the middle of a hardware upgrade. I have an
image file from before the upgrade, but hadn't finished the upgrade and
therefore hadn't re-imaged. The drive partition geometry has not
changed, so the older partition image's layout should be a correct
version of the one that was destroyed.

I believe it's just the basic partition table that was corrupted. So the
question: Is there any way to do a restore of the old partition(s) to
another drive to get the partitioning info. Then rewrite that partition
data to the original drive to see if it can be resurrected. The rest of
the files and file system may be intact.

There must be a specific procedure for copying and rewriting partition
tables via disk files, right?

 

Hello TalWolfe,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We regret to inform you that Acronis True Image is unable to recover partition that is lost from the partition table. However, Acronis Recovery Expert that is included into Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 may help you with the solution. Please download free trial version of Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 from our site and find out whether Acronis Recivery Expert is able to find the partition or not. The trial version will not recover the partition but it will let you find it. You may purchase the full version of Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 at our on-line store.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Hi Ilya,

I should have been more clear in my original comments. I have 'inherited' the maintenance of several systems, and my client already has relatively recent versions of True Image and Disk Director. The system in question has two boot partitions, both FAT32. The second partition is the one suspected to be corrupted. Possibly the first as well, but only the second is really required.

While I can't claim expertise with your software yet, I did load DD to see if the partitions were intact. They do display as expected, with correct size. The second partition was flagged in red though, so the partition values were incorrect.

After my previous post I took a closer look via the partition editor in DD. I wrote down all values. Then I restored an older (but identically partitioned) version of the same system partition to an extra drive, rebooted DD, and compared to the corrupted partition. Values were indeed off, including partition type (flagged as FAT16 in the corrupted partition rather than MSDOS4/FAT32). As there was nothing to lose in trying, I set up the original corrupted drive and edited in the 'correct' values by hand. This removed the red flag from the partition display, but data still does not appear correct (via boot from BartPE emergency boot CD).

While I'm sure you're cringing at my methodology, I'm trying to determine quickly whether to try to resurrect this partition or whether to restore an image that's a couple weeks old. Some programs will need to be reinstalled--not a huge concern. My main concern is actually removal of drivers from old hardware that was replaced in the past couple weeks. I'm afraid that I'll have to reinstall all old hardware to get at the drivers.

Since the DD editor displays question marks "" at the end of the edited-in drive label no matter what I type in, I thought that the flaw was in my hand-editing process. Is there an easy way to simply capture all relevant partition/geometry info from the older drive image and 'install' this on the current corrupted drive?

Regards,
TW