Why can't Acronis Recovery Expert recover my partition?

I have a 80gb hard drive in a Lenovo Thinkpad. The HD has two partitions. The 1st partition is 20gb and contains the Windows XP OS. The 2nd partition is 60gb and contains my data.

This morning I wanted to reinstalled the XP OS. I booted the XP CD and was presented with the installation locations. I was going to delete the 20gb partition but I accidentally deleted the 60gb partition. I realized my mistake right after I deleted the partition so I shutdown the laptop.

I then installed a 2nd HD in the CD bay and booted the Windows XP OS. I bought and installed the Acronis Disk Director software because Acronis sales informed me the Recovery Expert software would be able to recover the partition.

I have tried the software in both automatic and manual modes and it can't find a thing to recover. Why?

Help?

 

What error message do you get?

If it is telling you it can't find an empty partition, then I'd load DD10 itself and not the recovery expert and just check what it is showing.

It might be it isn't seeing your original hardrive.

Colin

 

I does see my original hard drive. When I load DD 10 is shows the original hard drive along with the remaining primary partition. When I use the recovery expert the automatic scan finds no partitions to recover. The advanced scan I left running for two days and if also found nothing.