OK, I was partitioning a WD caviar green into 900GB and 600GB partitions, by accident I started with 2 750GB (simplifying GB for ease by the way) so I went back in to gparted on a live cd to delete them and start again (quicker than resizing them - they were empty). Without thinking I didn't change the selected drive, and managed to delete the 2 partitions from my primary 500GB drive and accept the changes. Now I have lost a lot of important data, I had my main windows install and my coursework on there - my backups managed to corrupt themselves.
Now, I haven't touched the drive any further, I know the binary information is preserved because the partition removal took no time at all. All it did was update some piece of memory which describes the drive's formatting - would I be right in thinking that? The most important partition is the one I had vista installed on, the first partition in the disk and formatted by the vista installer, before that there was a 20MB or so block of unallocated space and the last 200GB or so of the drive was another partition I am not bothered about losing.
How can I get my coursework back? Is the file table still intact?
I suspect there will be a tool I can download which can search for a signature of the windows installation? or is everything lost?
edit: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk - I think this could help me, any words or warning or wisdom before I continue?
Now, I haven't touched the drive any further, I know the binary information is preserved because the partition removal took no time at all. All it did was update some piece of memory which describes the drive's formatting - would I be right in thinking that? The most important partition is the one I had vista installed on, the first partition in the disk and formatted by the vista installer, before that there was a 20MB or so block of unallocated space and the last 200GB or so of the drive was another partition I am not bothered about losing.
How can I get my coursework back? Is the file table still intact?
I suspect there will be a tool I can download which can search for a signature of the windows installation? or is everything lost?
edit: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk - I think this could help me, any words or warning or wisdom before I continue?
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