Help! Deleted a partition

[mokkapoop]

Guys, I hooked my 250gb external HD to a computer I was working on. I am reformatting the computer, and upon winxp setup, I was rushing through the setup and deleted a partition off my external HD. All my utilities and tools were on that partition, is there a way to get the partition back and or get all those files off where that partition was before? Please help a noob out!

[DermicSavage]

You can try using a disk rcovery tool, but it will not return everything(and in my experience did not return file names either). It will also bring back from the dead any parts of any files that were ever on there and wernt overwritten

[n64man120]

Yea theres some good software out there. My friend acidentally deleted his 30gb music partition, and managed to recover all of it with a software program. May be a bit pricey though. Not sure if there's any good free solutions

[mokkapoop]

whatever it takes, just get me the name of the program

[Paxonator]

getdataback worked alright for me once. Someone at my work deleted their partition and i used that to get most of the data they needed. I'm not sure how much it costs though.

[jpmkm]

Check out the utilities on the ultimate boot cd. There are some awesome partition utilities on there that can recover partitions. If you just deleted the partition and haven't done anything else to the drive then all your data is still there and it should just be a matter of rebuilding the partition table.

[n64man120]

I think I went to download.com and picked the most popular data recovery app, cant recall the name

[XxDaRkReAp3rxXdOtCoM]

this would be a horrbile time to say: pwn3d

[Ice Czar]

File Scavenger (http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm) (recovery - direct sector scanner)
meaning you need a place to write the data it finds to.

DiskPatch (http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/DiskPatch.htm) (repair)
rebuild the partition table in place

about $45 per, I have both they are a worthwhile investment

getdataback is a another direct sector scanner and costs more than FileScavenger
(note FileScavenger is a very good scanner, but has quite a strict license)
while I havent used Partition Saving (http://www.partition-saving.com/) which is on the Ultimate Boot CD,
it looks promising as a freeware alternative to Diskpatch (with a limited specialized scope applicable to your immediate needs)

in general freeware is harder to use requiring more user knowledge and or is less powerful than the better paidware aps, the power part is not always true, but the knowledge part typically is.

[Pyrolistical]

Just utilities and tools?

Why don't you just reinstall or just find everything again.

It would be way safer, just in-case the recovery process was not 100%.

I'm starting to think it's not utilities and tools =P

[parawing742]

Ontrack EasyRecovery
http://www.ontrack.com/Homepage.aspx?id=3&pagename=Software

I once used this software to restore TWO deleted partitions from a drive and they were both different file systems (NTFS & FAT32). It was able to find both partitions and recover about 99% of the files (with dos style names like MYHOMEP~.HTM).

It costs a little money, takes hours to complete, and you'll need a second drive to copy the recovered files too, but it does work very good.

[Ice Czar]

Ontrack EasyRecovery
http://www.ontrack.com/Homepage.aspx?id=3&pagename=Software

I once used this software to restore TWO deleted partitions from a drive and they were both different file systems (NTFS & FAT32). It was able to find both partitions and recover about 99% of the files (with dos style names like MYHOMEP~.HTM).

It costs a little money, takes hours to complete, and you'll need a second drive to copy the recovered files too, but it does work very good.

thats not "restoring" a partition, its recovering data from a partition ;)

a point that can often make a huge difference to someone that simply doesnt have a few hundred GB of space to write to

and while Ontrack makes a damn fine data recovery ap, I think their price structure is insane

when a partition is deleted all that occurs is the pointer to the metadata (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/ntfs/archFiles-c.html) is erased
formatting the drive overwrites the metadata itself, but both leave the data intact unless its subsequently overwritten its in plain sight to a direct sector scan, there is just no longer an address available to find it. And sometimes even all the metadata isnt overwritten and can be reconstructed if a reformat was done on a changed partition size, the $MFTMirr is the first 16 records of the MFT and is located at the back of the partition.

you can attempt repairs for a deleted partition with a high probability of sucess by reconstruction the link to the metadata, you can sometimes rebuild the metadata itself
you can almost always rescue the data, the two things you avoid at all costs is defragmenting when there is a corruption issue and what is incorrectly called a low level format which is accurately described as a zero fill overwriting all the sectors ( a true low level format is now only done in factories do to the increased areal density, and is writing a description of the disk geometry with sectors, tracks, cylinders and servo bursts)

If you have the space, first you rescue data with a recovery ap, then attempt to repair the filestructure. This is under the presumption that the reason there was a failure was mechanical, the drive is dieing. If you have a high confidence that the drive itself is OK and its just user error, there really isnt any reason to attempt recovery first, when a simple repair is all that is required, so doing it in place makes sense.


between the cost of free with Partition Saving and $89 for the cheapest version of Ontrack Easy Recovery, Id at least try Partition Saving, and then if I was investing in aps the two I linked, both of which could be had for nearly the price of Easy Recovery

here is a link to some good info about the NTFS filesystem and recovery potentials
http://www.ntfs.com/
http://www.ntfs.com/#ntfs%20rec