help... have i lost the data?

_Jimlad_ · 19 May 2012 at 22:16

fixing up this really old pc for someone and it had a second ide 20gig drive... you know the old ribbon ones

anyway when putting windows7 on it somehow promoted itself to the primary disc and i clicked delete during the install. at that point i saw what i had done and stopped so nothing has been installed, have i lost the data on the drive by deleting the partition and if so, how do i recover as at the moment windows does not see it yet (only in disc management)

ffs!

nickeverett · 19 May 2012 at 22:33

If you've only deleted the partition, not formatted. The data should still be there, just not visible in windows.

Can't remember the name of the recovery program I used before though....

KIA · 19 May 2012 at 22:51

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

_Jimlad_ · 19 May 2012 at 23:11

cool trying that now, seems to have seen the files, what a school boy error

Azuse05 · 20 May 2012 at 01:13

recuva

charlaph · 20 May 2012 at 09:22

If you have no joy with those try searching for linux based progs. I've had joy with GPartd in the past

_Jimlad_ · 20 May 2012 at 10:56

getdataback did the trick for me

Aod · 20 May 2012 at 23:25

Well done for stopping yourself in time! recovering the data is trivially easy if all that's gone is the partition table, but if you'd then started writing things to the disk, recovering the data would have been excruciatingly difficult (like, £500 per hour difficult :eek:

)

_Jimlad_ · 21 May 2012 at 00:14

Aod said:
Well done for stopping yourself in time! recovering the data is trivially easy if all that's gone is the partition table, but if you'd then started writing things to the disk, recovering the data would have been excruciatingly difficult (like, £500 per hour difficult )

yeah school boy error presumed the d drive would remain the 2nd drive when installing afresh, but yeah VERY lucky i twigged on.

KIA · 21 May 2012 at 10:40

_Jimlad_ said:
getdataback did the trick for me

Excellent.

firstborn · 21 May 2012 at 20:47

Are the apps on the Live CD fully functional and free? Recently used an old version of getdataback to recover files from a mirrored RAID that had zeros written to it for 10 mins..... recovered almost everything. Although all the file names were meaningless.

_Jimlad_ · 21 May 2012 at 21:54

firstborn said:
Are the apps on the Live CD fully functional and free? Recently used an old version of getdataback to recover files from a mirrored RAID that had zeros written to it for 10 mins..... recovered almost everything. Although all the file names were meaningless.

to restore u need to pay the money.

SimonC · 22 May 2012 at 11:33

I've done this, but had an external drive plugged in which I formatted. Didn't realise until it was too late, but I had a copy of everything so all wasn't lost.

Now I unplug external and internal drives just to make sure. :rolleyes:

But a bit of a relief I bet getting it all back.

Hamster · 22 May 2012 at 15:24

_Jimlad_ said:
getdataback did the trick for me

Good stuff! Getdataback is what I always use. I've used Recuva in the past but I seem to be able to retrieve more with getdataback.