Can I get back my harddrive partitions

[MrHawk]

Last night I got back a raptor drive that I had RMA'd. I hooked it up to the raid controller on my abit board which can run 4 sata drives. I had the 2 raptors drives and a 3 drive that was not for the raid. When I set the raid up the controller apparently deleted the partitions on the 3 drive. When I go into XP it shows the drive as unallocated. I tried Partition Magic 7 put it didn't help. Is there a program out there that might be able to get the partitions back or should I just formst the drive and go on with life. I don't think there was anything too important on it except for a few photos.

Thanks,

 

[FlyingPenguin]

You should have selected an option to "Rebuild" the array (or something similar to that). Sounds like you deleted it and created a new array.

No, I don't think there's anything you can do. The array is setup at the hardware level by the RAID controller. BIOS and and Windows don't "see" the drives that make up the array, just a singe psuedo-drive that the array represents.

Normal data recovery apps won't help either.

I would suggest you contact the RAID controller chip's manufacturer tech support and see if they have any suggestions.

 

[Calin]

You could use Lost And Found to try and recover the data from the disk with the deleted partitions. You will need a different drive to store them. I tried once to "recover" partitions (but I knew where they started and where they ended) but with little luck

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Lost and Found won't help if he's deleted the array. There's nothing there to recover. Lost and found - like any Windows app - is not "aware" of the individual hard drives in the array (the array is built at the hardware level). It's only aware of the psuedo-drive that the array emulates.

 

[MrHawk]

The 3rd drive was not part of the array. The 2 raptor drives were part of the array. I just assume when I set the array up on the 2 raptors it deleted the partitions on the 3rd drive. Anyway, it was suggested that I give the program Active Partition Recovery a try and it found the 3 deleted partitions and restored them along with all the files. All is well again!

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Glad you got it fixed.