Deleted Partition

[Ronin]

Ok, so I figured it was time to reinstall WinXP on my primary box. No big deal, right? I've done this plenty of times before. I reboot with the OS disk in the CD-ROM drive, go into the WinXP setup and get to the partition selection screen. Now normally, my C shows up as the primary HD, and I delete and recreate the partition, and then format it and continue my install. Well, here's where my problem comes into play.

My Firewire drive was actually the first drive this time, and I didn't notice this until AFTER I'd deleted the partition. On this drive was roughly 20GB of backed up data, all fairly important. Naturally, I'm very unhappy. I get WinXP installed where it's supposed to be, and WinXP won't read the drive, so I go to Iomega's website and grab their tools to format the drive. I'm in the process of doing that now, and hoping when it's done, I can use a data recovery tool to recover the data.

If I can't, does anyone have any other suggestions what to do so that I can recover this data, save paying a fair amount of money to some company to do it for me?

 

[gentobu]

I dont think it was a good idea to format the drive again. The data recovery utility should be able to 'see' the drive even though it hasnt been formatted yet. Anyway as long as you didnt copy anything to the drive there should be a good chance for you to get your data back.

 

[Ronin]

Nothing copied aside from the file system. Everytime I tried to select the drive, however, it didn't recognize, and that was my biggest problem, which is why I formatted, else I wouldn't have.

The hard part has been finding a data recovery tool that I could use, however.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'm open to ideas.

 

[lucky9]

freewarefiles.com has disk investigator v1.3 in utilities/fileanddisk

there are going to be others who have had to use something like this. i have no personal experience with needing such. nowadays i save to cdr. i use a secondary hd as backup#1 and burn an image to cdr with ghost. the third level is to periodically normal my docs etc on cdr with nero.

don't get in a hurry. if it can be saved, it will still be there tomorrow and next week. but there should be plenty of good progs to do this sort of thing, norton is famous for their disk recovery tools.

there are a lot of other sites with recovery tools available. i named one that's on my favorites and i could do a quick check. if i can get something as fast as i did, you can too.

time a factor? if so, visit some other forums and do a google search.

check back for others to have some time to get here and that know more about this sort of thing (recovery) than i do.

 

[Ronin]

I'm hoping I won't have to spend the weekend doing this, because I've already taken quite some time.