XP ate my partition! Help needed!

Craig · Post by **Craig** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 9:46 am

Ok so the thing is my hard drive had three partitions. A little 2GB ms-dos one for playing old games, this is C: . I also had on for windows XP(d

, and my own 16(odd) GB partition(g

.

I had accumilated lots of loose ends, some spyware that wouldn't go, half uninstalled programs, so we (me and my dad) decided to reinstall windows XP. Problem is that some how, (I have no idea how) XP got installed over my partition (where ALL of my stuff was backed up to), and it left the old version of XP in. Now the new one is called d: and the old one E:, G: has become one of my cd/dvd drives.

My dad tried to use R studios to recover it. It found my two folders on the lost partition, but nothing inside them. Also tried a prog called Unformat and Unerase to no avail.

Can anyone help at all? Please!

Mr Flibble · Post by **Mr Flibble** » Mon Oct 18, 2004 11:04 pm

Firstly, I'd check disk mangement on computer manager to see if the partition is there but not assigned a drive letter.

If not, the best utilities for recovering deleted or overwritten data are Lost & Found from Powerquest and Disk Commander from Winternals. Lost and Found was discontinued by Powerquest just before they were bought out by Symantec, but you can still get the demo here which may help. However, the Admin Pak from Winternals is the better choice, but it's a bit high on the $$$ side.

Craig · Post by **Craig** » Tue Oct 19, 2004 12:50 pm

Thank you!!!! It's downloading now.

It's there, it just has windows XP installed over it. I tried something called Recover my files. But that takes up too much memory to run without freezing. I'm not lacking in the Memory department though.

Ok then.... Just installed it. It wants a serial number and it says I need to buy it to actually recover the files..... Help?

tom the terribl · Post by **tom the terribl** » Fri Oct 29, 2004 8:40 pm

Fat

I sugget you start over with one partition. About running old games; if your fond of a game look on the games site for update. Then your game may work in XP.

To get to one partition delete all partitions them set up 1 for all. But I suggest you copy anything you may lose like email and drivers you downloaded to cd. Do you have the original startup floppy made by Microsoft. You will need one; if possible copy the drivers for running the pci bus and bridge. Also you'll need drivers for at least one cd. Now copy fdisk and format to a bootable floppy.

Microsoft uses oak drivers for the pci bus and cd. Try and findout if you can download drivers from their site.

[SIZE=5]Don't do this without the foppy with the ability to open the pci bus and cd rom or your have a dead pc.[/SIZE]

kmzpub · Post by **kmzpub** » Fri Oct 14, 2005 12:53 am

Greetings,

Active@ Partition Recovery can be used to restore lost partition. It works really great and helped me much before. Give it a try, I'm pretty sure it will help you.
http://www.partition-recovery.com/

Antharias2k · Post by **Antharias2k** » Sun Oct 16, 2005 3:53 am

This is funny, soz

This happened to me recently and I figured out a way to do this. Just follow the following.

Okay, start by getting onto a network so that you can recover all that data onto another machine.

Get your hands on a program called Stellar Phoenix (you will have to BUY the program). Follow the instructions in it and you will be able to get the stuff that you have lost. It took me about 2 and a half days to recover 140 gigs of info. That is because of a lot of small files that I had like pictures and other stuff.

Once you have done that, you will want to get your harddrives started afresh, so get everything on to the other machine/s on the network and you will want to start afresh, and try not to create partitions, I have had endless nonsense from them and losing all that information that is on the drive can be hair-raising enough.

That will work more than likely. You won't get the parition back, but you will get your info back.