Lo guys, Need a bit of help, Mum has really screwed up something on one of our comps, she put a back up application on the comp and it was all setup to backup to partion D:, well anyway, she deleted the partition in windows explorer but pressed cancel half way through because she realised that isn't what she meant to do (seriously, she teaches people how to use computers, I cannot believe she did something like this, bah!). I went through diskmanagement under admin tools and found the partition, it said free space but no driver letter so I assigned it one without formatting it. It wont let me access it without formatting it though...any ideas? Any tools out there than can get me in? If not, anyway or retrieving the files? Cheers, Dad's going ballistic lol
I'd try booting a Linux live cd... That might be a free way of getting to it... just mount the partition somewhere, and pass the correct filesystem to the mount command... There are plenty of other threads about data recovery, I'd try the software adviced in those i that doesn't work
Well, get yourself a Linux Live CD, boot from the disk and try to read the contents of the partition. Since the data isn't deleted, it might work (I had done it once on an ext2 partition)
Hmmm I use that as a last resort seeing as I have never used linux before. Currently I cannot access the drive because it does not have a file structure because I didn't formatt. If I do a quick formatt that doesn't delete the data does it? Which should then allow a recovery application to find it right?!
After you assign it a drive letter in the admin disk management tools. Try opening up a command prompt and type "chkdsk insertdriveletterhere: /x"
I'll give that a go but I don't think you've understood me, probably my fault, tricky to explain. Basically the backup application took charge of the partition for some odd reason, anyway, uninstalled the application and it deleted the partition. I went into disc management and assinged it a drive letter without formatting and is saying I can't access it now, probably because it doesn't have a proper file structure, especially if this backup app has done something weird to it.
if you can remember the partition type used, you can try using PTEdit to manually edit the partition table to tell it what type it is. if you tell it it's suypposed to be NTFS or whatever, something like partitionmagic or getdataback may then be able to reconstruct it. in fact, scratch that, just try getdataback now. http://www.runtime.org/
I got a cracked version off bit-torrent, and it tells me thats its FAT32, so i did the search and it knows that there are files there BUT when i go to the next stage of the software that allows you to copy the data back there is no files shown, now I still think this is because windows doesn't think it has a file structure, would a quick format in FAT32 help?
you sure about that? it takes ages to scan and also has a very odd directory tree that has confused me occasionally. (getdataback pretty much bypasses the windows API for accessing the disk so it's not that)
hmmm, well you know the page after it has done its scanning, it tell you where the files begin and where the directory begins on a coloured bar? the page after that is the one where you can see the actual files right? well there aint nothing there, should I put up some screenies so you can see? (it is only a 20gb partition btw).
huh. i haven't used it in ages, so i can't really talk specifics. can't help further, sorry. (but it SHOULD work... :s )
It would obviously be worth trying a FREE program [such as Smart NTFS Recovery] first.... but others you might want to try, before you resort to buying a program, include: SoftPerfect File Recovery (another FREE program!) PC Inspector File Recovery (also FREE!) R-Studio (like GDB - very comprehensive) Recover My Files Restore My Files (inexpensive @ £15-ish) Data Recovery Wizard (this one also looks promising - since it specifically states it can help recover files from "hard drives that have been formatted")
