Data Recovery software - partition lost. HELP!

[Rezzin]

My roomate's system has 2 HD's. Primary (30gb) has Win2k NTFS and is plugged into the ata133 .. the secondary drive (60gb) is FAT32 and is used for storage and is plugged into a regular IDE slot. His board has onboard RAID/ATA. He was going to install Win2k over again and accidentally deleted the 60gb parition on his secondary drive (since he didn't see the primary drive and forgot to use F6 to load the drivers) - I've tried loading Partition Magic to see if I can recover the deleted partiion but it won't allow me to undelete the deleted partition. Does anyone know of a software package that can do this reliably? Nothing has been written to the drive that I know of (he said he shut the computer down after he did that)... when I plug the drive back in WIn2k detects it but I chose 'NO' to format so it's just sitting there. Any help will be GREATLY appreciated! FYI, he only had 1 parition on the drive. 60gb in size.

 

[Zepper]

Boilerplate-02:
Data Recovery-
. If your drive isn't physically or electronically damaged perhaps one of the following will help:
Lost & Found from PowerQuest (the Partition Magic folks). They don't make it any more, but I have seen it listed as "In Stock" here: MSBCD . I've used this to save the bacon for myself and others several times. Be sure to download and install the updates from the PQ web site before using. They would have sold a lot more if they hadn't tried to limit its use to one computer and their protection scheme so easy to circumvent . This is FAT only.
. This next is new and even claims to recover data from fragged RAID 0 drives... R-Studio . The software has several versions - one for just the file system you are using and the big package which works with several file systems. Many AT denizens rely on it.
. You can DL a demo which will tell you what the full pkg will be able to recover--so you can see what you would get before you plunk down your $$$s (I just DLd the demo myself for insurance <g> ). Can't beat that!
.bh.

 

[redbeard1]

Norton utilities has an unformat utility that may work also.

 

[VicodiN]

Norton Unerase is very limited compared to R-Studio... If ya have the cash, R-Studio's probably the way to go

 

[spanky]

check ur pm

 

[Rezzin]

Wow - thanks for all the help everyone. A friend of mine came over tonight with a copy of Ontrack EasyRecoveryPro I think it's called. The scan is actually running now (ETA 1 hour) - it's late so I need to get some sleep. I will post later tomorrow with the results. *keeping my fingers crossed* I might consider buying this utility based on it's performance but he said it runs up in the $400+ range OUCH.

Thanks again!

 

[farscape]

Let me know how it turns out also. Was in the process of rebuilding a system when w2k decided to make our seperate 10 gig backup drive (FAT32) unreadable. Says its all free space. Tried a few crippleware programs and everything is still there but trying to recover a few at a time will take forever. So I'm looking for something reasonably priced.

 

[farscape]

Let me know how it turns out also. Was in the process of rebuilding a system when w2k (fresh install) decided to make our seperate 10 gig backup drive (FAT32) unreadable. Formatted the 40 OK, never 'touched' the 10 during the install. Thing ran fine under 2K server. Says its all free space. Tried a few crippleware programs and everything is still there but trying to recover a few at a time will take forever. So I'm looking for something reasonably priced.

 

[qquizz]

I'm pretty sure a progam from Winternals.com will do what you need if you dont have any luck for data recovery. Link

Let us know what happens.