joe7dust

I have been searching around for awhile and seen so many different suggestions I'm worried to try one without a little guidance.

Basically, I think the partition was accidentally deleted from a Windows XP install disc. It says drive is not formatted and I recently reformatted the system partition and reinstalled windows. Its possible I deleted both partitions by mistake.

Should I use testdisc, recovermyfiles, getmydataback, or something else?

I don't want to use recovermyfiles if possible I heard it can take a week.

raptor_pa

First of all, there is no such thingas fast recovery software if you are doing a scan for data recovery. From whatyou describe, I'd start with test disk, best chance of rebuilding the MBR/ partition table. After that, you are down to scanning for files by header signatures. Depending on the size of the drive, and what the issue with the drive is yes it can take a while. I haven't found a free software that does a lot of file types. r-studio is like $50 for the NTFS or FAT version, and is used by a lot of DR pros. First thing I would try would be to rebuild or reload the secondary MBR with test_disk and see if it comes to ife.

joe7dust

I followed the testdisc guide, but The partition in question is not showing at all and neither is the system partition (probably intended) so basically the entire harddrive is missing from the drive selection screen. All it says are E: F: G: (optical & 2 partitions of my flash drive). I tried copying testdisc over to C: and running it from there but C: and D: (the missing partition) are not present.

Is there another trick I should try before getting R-Studio ?

joe7dust

OK I scanned it with R-Studio. It found lots of things but when I say to "restore all" it says no supported file system. I'm guessing I should just format the drive as "quick format" without windows explorer and then try again once it has been assigned a proper file system? Kind of scary since it sounds like I'm overwriting but if I remember right a quick format doesn't actually delete the data...

raptor_pa

No, because you will create a new file system no format thru windows actually overwrites any data but it won't help to recovery. You will need another disk to recover yopur data to, you can't recover to the disk that has your data because you will overwrite what you are trying to recover. Does r-studio find the drive? Did you make sure all the file types are selected when you scanned? Maker sure the box is checked to scan for file types. You are not trying to fix the file system on the broken disk, but trying to locate your data and copy it off to another disk, then you can format and copy your data back.

joe7dust

Looks like it may take longer than a week. :o

There were about 30+ different "recognized###" bits under the drive D: and to get the ball rolling I had to right click on one and hit "recover all files".

It has been running all day and I can only assume I will be doing this for each "recognized" heading. Oh boy...

raptor_pa

Usually the first one ( green or yellow) is the best fit - you will notice that some are probably even the wrong filesystem type. If you save the scan report, you can shut the app down, and look at the recovered files to see if you got the data you need.

joe7dust

Would you mind walking me through exactly how to pause it in such a way that its like I never stopped? I don't want to lose what it's spent the last day or 2 doing and I can't see half of the stuff on the screen because my root problem is a corrupted video chip. Things like checkboxes don't show up and many other missing elements like the X button to close windows, etc.

joe7dust

Looks like that first 2 days didn't recover much. It pops up a window that says Name Path and its blank inside. Not sure if that's because of my video problem or nothing was really found. It showed thousands upon thousands of "recovering 236142.mpg" or "recovering 219968.txt" while it was working, but now that it has finished in the bottom right it says 512B in 1 files in 2 folders. Wow...

Anyways, just started on the 2nd green line and it immediately says 9.1MB in 1 file in the lower right. This one finished in about 1 minute, again with a blank list afterwards.

Starting on the first yellow line now and it says 205MB in 1 file right away in the lower right. I don't understand the estimated size was in the gigabytes when I selected the "recognized##" lines.

joe7dust

If anyone has input it would be nice, at this point it is looking like time to give up.

Another 2 days of "restoring all files" only to pop up an emtpy window. This time I hit "select all" and "recover" just in case video problems were making the files not show up. It showed the Vista circle for a bit then it was like back to square one. 0 bytes in the folder I told it to back things up to on the external drive.

joe7dust

My roommate won't be happy about his data missing but **** it I am so done with this. This laptop is going to be recommended as scrapped for a downpayment on a new one.