Well today i was about to reformat an old ocmputer that has photos from about 8 years ago. i back them up to an external harddrive and just about before the reformat screen it ask u to install or remove partitions i acidently removed the partitions on the harddrive and the external drive. now when trying to acees data on the external hardrive i get the message saung it needs to be reformated or if i dont want data to be reformated click cancel which i do but the computer does not recognise the hardrive is there anyway to get my photos back? i have laptop also but the phot arent on there this i how i access the external harddrive to see if i could get them back. i also cant get on the computer as it says boot error when witching it on.

any help really would be appreciated

This post has been edited by Wiggy: Sep 13 2008, 05:39 AM

You can get data recovery programs for this sort of thing, they scan your hard drive and try and recover anything they can. And they're pretty effective. I use a program called Recover My Files and it works very well. However, the program is about $60USD, and I dunno if you want to spend that much. Once you have the program, you basically just tell it to scan your drive and let it go. I've had scans take over two days to complete, however, just to warn you.

Also - while the program is pretty effective at recovering data, it doesn't recover the original names, it labels them in the format (for a picture, for example) "Recovered_jpeg_01," etc. There may be other programs that do the same thing, this is the one that I'm familiar with.

A guy I worked with said once he did the same thing, and re-created the partition (but the numbers have to be EXACTLY what they were before: cluster and all). Then everything was back as it was. This was before XP (I think). I never tried it but thought to put it out there. He says he believes it worked because when you remove the partition it's not really gone yet, but when you re-create it and then format it then it's gone. I can't confirm or deny this but thought this piece of info might be helpful here.

thanks for the advice obviosuly i would like to save the money though if its the only way then guess il have to shell out the money for it.

the next problem ofcoure is that iv been lookinginto many programs and many of them require you to boot intow windows to use them ofcourse i cant get on the orignal computer an when i plug in my external drive it dosent recognise it at all so i can acces that.

tyring a bit of softare caled ultimate boot disk found in this topic here .ultimate boot disk

This post has been edited by Wiggy: Sep 13 2008, 07:30 AM

tried the program although it was a little to complicated for me has anyone elsse used it as i couldnt really find any tutorials on how to use it. also used a program called partition magic although it was unable to find the lost partiotion could anyone else help me please

You may try connecting the hardware to another computer as Slave (Secondary slave). If the computer can read it, you may retrieve your lost files.

If not, you'll have to use a recovery tool.