Hard drive partition gone, can I recover data?

[Zab]

1 hard drive with 3 partitions running xp

My computer just shut itself down sometime this evening. So when I went to try and restart it, it just rebooted itself as soon as windows was about to load.

I put in a boot disk and was able to see the files at the dos prompt, but was unable to copy the files over to another partition.

I then took the hard drive out and installed it in another computer, I could not see any files in windows and the partition is labelled as an unallocated partition.

Is there any way I could get any of the files of the primary partition, or a way to make the FAT available again without destroying the data, or am I sol and stuck with reformatting it?

Thanks

 

[AbsolutDealage]

get a hold of a copy of Partition Magic.... or another good third party partitioning software. It should be able to recover that partition.

 

[Zab]

Ok I will give that a try and see what happens.

 

[Zab]

I tried partition magic without any success. It won't let me change the FAT, or the primary to logical.

Does anyone have any other ideas, or do I have to reformat?