Deleted wrong Partition while installing windows

[Nvidiaguy07]

i have not touched that hard drive because ive heard to get all the data back its best to leave it alone. I installed vista in a different hard drive and now i just need a way to make my partition reappear.

Someone recommended testdisk and a few other but when i tried them i scan my 500GB hard dirve(the one i deleted) and it says no partitions found.

what am i doing wrong or what other software is there to recover my data?

 

[smb]

I use stellar phoenix data recovery. but i can't remember how much i paid for it. it works pretty good. I don't know of any freeware recovery stuff.

 

[QuixoticOne]

You must leave it alone and do nothing that is going to write to it unless you're sure you can undo any changes if they don't work.

It may help if you knew the exact size of the original partitions and the partition layout.

If you had a partition (A) say from Cylinder 1 to Cylinder 999, and then a partition (B) from Cylinder 1000 to Cylinder 34567, and you mistakenly deleted (A) then you could just recreate (without formatting!) another partition (A) of the right size and location boundaries and it should show up again.

Or similarly for (B). Basically the partition table just records the type and start / end locations for all your primary partitions and a few other details. If you know what piece is missing and the location it is missing from, recovery can just be a case of rewriting the right start / end / type data into the partition table.

 

[QuixoticOne]

What version of testdisk did you run and from what OS / boot CD did you run it?
What options did you give it?
Did it identify the drive as 500gb OK?