Hard drive problem - deleted partition

[daveshel]

I'm trying to help somebody who screwed up his hard drive. He wanted to install Ubuntu on unpartitioned space on a hard drive than was running XP on the first partition. It looks like he failed to select 'custom' from the installation menu, and before he knew what was happening, the Ubuntu installer deleted his XP partition and created several linux partitions.

I mounted the drive up in my computer and played around with a couple programs I downloaded. The first one could see the old partition but wanted $139 to bring it back. The next one (TestDrive) could see the old partition but said the structure was bad when I tried to bring it back. Are there any tools/techniques that are likely to recover his data? If I could just copy some files off onto another drive he would be happy.

 

[mpilchfamily]

Your on the right track. Problem is any sectors that Ubuntu actually wrote data too will not be recoverable. So the areas where the OS is sitting right now are lost as far as the windows files go. Any other free sectors that have been formated but not writen over can be retreived. I persoanlly wouldn't spend any money to revcover the information. Just keep doing what your doing with the free recovery tools you can find. But now your friend has learned the hard way that you should always keep a backup of your important data.

 

[daveshel]

I've tried no less than a dozen utilities and haven't found one that will do the job for free. Anybody have any experience with these?

 

[Intexity]

well its not free but get data back has saved my skin more than once. Of course you can acquire it without paying but thats up to you.

 

[daveshel]

Good tip. When it got to the point where I could actually see and open the individual files, I went ahead and bought it. It was $79 and my buddy will kick in, and who knows, it could even end up paying for itself.

 

[Intexity]

Glad to see it worked for ya. Should be able to get it to pay itself off.