[Icculus]

So I deleted my entire hard drive's partition...

It was just a media drive, however I was wondering if there was any way that I could recover the data on it.

I haven't reformatted or done anything to the disk since the deletion.


Any ideas/help?

[Advertisements]

What kind of media drive? Well heres some i have used.

http://officerecover...elete/index.htm

http://www.runtime.org/downloads.htm

http://www.brotherso...escue-4680.html

http://www.newfreedo...escue-Plus.html

One of these should work.

SRX660

[SRX660]

What kind of media drive? Well heres some i have used.

http://officerecover...elete/index.htm

http://www.runtime.org/downloads.htm

http://www.brotherso...escue-4680.html

http://www.newfreedo...escue-Plus.html

One of these should work.

SRX660

[Kemasa]

You should be able to re-create the partition without losing any data as long as you make it exactly the same and don't use a tool which also creates the filesystem. Also, it assumes that what you did only affected the boot block.

If it was the whole device, it should be pretty easy.

[Icculus]

Short background: My boot drive crashed yesterday so I was reinstalling XP on a hard drive that I previously was not using.

In XP setup, I was dumb and thought my hard drive had two partitions (as it used to) and thought both things I saw were the two partitions, but they were both hard drives.

So, it was the simple press D to delete and press L to delete partition.

I like to think I am somewhat a techy, but things like partitions I don't know.

I think it was a Seagate 250 gig HD... Will the aforementioned programs fix this?


Also... I was never booting off the disk I want to recover if that means anything

[vally]

If you only Deleted the partitionand did not write any data then you should be able to recover close to everything. The recovery can recover allmost any thing as long as it is not written over.
Try to run the programs to see what you can find.
You can run it if have an operating system on it. Or connect it to a different computer and just connect the hard drive you want to search.

[Icculus]

So how do these programs work?

My drive is still unpartitioned so my computer doesn't read it

Should I format my drive? Quick format?

[vally]

Should I format my drive? Quick format?

Do not format. The less changes you do on the disk the better.

So how do these programs work?

I am not really sure. I think they go over the allocation tables or just try to read from the disk. I have not yet looked in to this but I have recovered data many times.

My drive is still unpartitioned so my computer doesn't read it

What matters is that the bios can recognize the disk and that the windows device manager in the computer recognizes the hard drive. Now run the recovery program and see what it finds. The scanning of the disk is usually free so that you can know what you get if you buy it. There are a few free programs.

Have you tried a recovery program yet?

[Icculus]

So GetDataBack for NTFS worked...

However, It is a 400 gig drive and only read as a 128 gig. Will my windows update fix this when they start downloading? BIOS reads it as 400.

128 is a number that makes me think its an XP thing.

DevManager also reads it as 128 gig

EDIT:
And as always, thank you for the help...

Edited by Icculus, 05 December 2007 - 06:57 PM.

[vally]

If I understand you correctly you managed to save the data. Did you get all of it?
Where did you save it? is it on the same hard drive?

In the disk management how does it say that the disk is setup? Is it a partition or the 128 gig is the whole disk?
(If you don't know how to get there right click My Computer -> manage -> then click on "disk management ")

What does it say?

If you saved all the data and the disk is empty you can now format it through the disk management.