Topic: Lost Partition on hard drive how to Restore

[LEDZEPZOSO]

Seeing if anyone has any suggestion for this.
I booted up my laptop this weekend and I lost my D Partition on my hard drive. I kept all my programs on the C with all my data on the D partition.

I am running windows XP with a 80 Gig Hard drive. When I go to the Computer Manager Disk Manager I see the C (NTFS) Partition with 14G and 56G Freespace as a unassigned partition but is in FAT file system.

I have tried quite a few partition repair/recovery programs with no luck. Some programs I have used have been JFilerecovery, Getdataback, Partition Wizard, Recuva, Pc Inspector, Smart Partition, EASEUS Partition Master among a few other that I did not save. So far none of them have even recognized the D partition.

Anyone have any other suggestion or software that might be able to restore my partition. Prefer Freeware but I am almost to the point to pay for software product.

Thanks

[flipp]

Have you tried booting from a live Linux cd? You can boot from the cd and it won't make any changes to your hard-drive. Once Linux is running you can access partitions formatted for Windows (either NTFS or FAT). If the D: partition doesn't show up in Linux I doubt you'll be able to recover it without sending it to a data recovery service. If it does appear, transfer your data to an external drive so you can at least access it once back in Windows (if it appears you'll also be able to access it from Linux).

[fleish]

Back when I used windows I used Partition Magic for various partition tasks. Don't know if it will help you here, so maybe give their documentation a read before buying.

[Ziggz]

A few years ago I successfully recovered 3 partitions with this http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I'd accidentally left a bootable floppy in the drive - it happened to contain and launch a program that deleted partitions 

[runonce]

Gparted is a bootable Linux CD made for managing disc partitions - very handy.
Also - ask over at the Ubuntu forums... (people trying to dual boot Window and Linux seem to end up with blown partitions.) Those guys seem to know alot about HD formatting issues.

http://ubuntuforums.org/

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gparted

[LEDZEPZOSO]

Thanks for all the suggestion but so far none of the software suggested work. It looks like I might finally have have to jump in the Linux world. I am going to try a couple more thing this weekend, if these things do not work I am off to the land of the penguins.

Thanks again to all that took time to offer up suggestions.

[flipp]

One other piece of software to try - Stellar Phoenix. They have a trial version which is free. It will run and show you what it sees/can recover; however in order to recover what it finds you have to purchase the program. If it doesn't see the data then there is no need to purchase. http://www.stellarinfo.com/

If you wind up using a Linux live CD, many distributions come with gparted.  If Linux can see the lost partition I still recommend copying your data to a removable drive before using gparted. While gparted's interface is easy to understand it is also easy to wipe your data unintentionally. If the hosed partition is visible, back up/copy any data before attempting to adjust any partitions.

[LEDZEPZOSO]

Thanks for every ones reply's and suggestion. Was finally able to get everything restored today. The finally steps I took where:

1. Purchase a new hard Drive and reload a clean copy of Windows. Sucks was I have to buy a PATA drive so it of course cost more then a SATA.
2. Purchase a enclose for my old Hard Drive
3. tried about 10-15 restore software with no luck, tried a program called "find and Mount" and it saw off my files on my old drive. Did a copy and paste and it transferred everything from my old drive to the new drive. My only mistake was that with the personal version it would only transfer at 512 kbs so for the 50 gigs i had to move it took over 30 hours, but worth the wait.

So for $115 I was able to save my files, get a hard drive with 4 times the memory and have a 80gig portable drive plus hours of fun Googling every combination of "hard drive partition restore lost files" that you can.

Again thanks for all the help.

[fleish]

Thanks for every ones reply's and suggestion. Was finally able to get everything restored today. The finally steps I took where:

1. Purchase a new hard Drive and reload a clean copy of Windows. Sucks was I have to buy a PATA drive so it of course cost more then a SATA.
2. Purchase a enclose for my old Hard Drive
3. tried about 10-15 restore software with no luck, tried a program called "find and Mount" and it saw off my files on my old drive. Did a copy and paste and it transferred everything from my old drive to the new drive. My only mistake was that with the personal version it would only transfer at 512 kbs so for the 50 gigs i had to move it took over 30 hours, but worth the wait.

So for $115 I was able to save my files, get a hard drive with 4 times the memory and have a 80gig portable drive plus hours of fun Googling every combination of "hard drive partition restore lost files" that you can.

Again thanks for all the help.

Wow, that must have been some really great pron you wanted to save \

Seriously though, glad to hear it all worked out finally. I love a happy ending.