Oh man, I screwed up big time. Is there any way to UNDO a mistake in FDISK?

[Imyourzero]

OK, so my new Seagate 200GB hard drive came in yesterday. I decided to go ahead and set it up last night as additional storage. My primary drive is a 250 GB Maxtor.

So I use a boot disk to boot into DOS and run FDISK, thinking I'll just create a couple of partitions on the Seagate drive. It was late and I was in a hurry, and somehow I ended up deleting 1 or more partitions on the Maxtor. I've used FDISK before with no problems, but I guess I was in such a hurry that I didn't take the time to notice which drive was which, and now of course that sysytem won't boot from the Maxtor.

That Maxtor was divided into 3 partitions. C/D/E. I was using C: as a dedicated partition for the OS, D: was empty (I had planned on installing Linux onto D, and E: was where all of my programs, games, music, etc. were contained. I hooked the Maxtor up as a slave on another PC and booted into Windows from that PC's primary drive, and the Maxtor now shows up as only 2 drives. 1 is a ~50GB partition that's empty and the other appears to be a large partition with 1 file in it (which cannot be accessed because Windows gives a message that the disk is corrupt or needs to be formatted).

Is there ANY way to recover from this? I had nearly 100 GB worth of data that I need to get back if at all possible. Legal MP3 backups, homework files, music videos, etc.

Here is a program that looks like it MIGHT be able to help me, but is there anything else I can do/try? I would hate to pay for that program if it wouldn't be able to recover my data, but I get the impression that there's no guarantee.

I will be forever indebted to anyone that can help me fix this...

 

[Fern]

Nver had to use such proggies, so I can't vouch for any. But here is a link I've kept just in case
LINK #1

 

[Arcanedeath]

Ontrack's Easy Recovery software should be able to take care of this issue no problem although it's kinda pricy. (around a min of $60) to get your data back.

 

[nageov3t]

www.runtime.org

it's not free, but it does the job.

there is a trial version on the website that will let you see if/what files are recoverable. but until you buy the program, you can't actually recover the files. it really helped me out when PartitionMagic killed my main drive.

 

[Imyourzero]

Thanks guys, I'm going to check into that GDB software as well as the one from Ontrack...hopefully ONE of them can help me. I'll install that trial of GDB and hook up my fux0r3d hard drive to this computer and see what happens. $79 is pretty steep in a way, but data recovery can be priceless to some people. I spent years collecting some of the files on that hard drive (including some pics I took with my digicam that cannot be replaced) so I think I'd pay the money for the program if it came down to it.

 

[eelw]

$79 is steep??? How poor a student are you? Lucky that you didn't have a HW failure and you needed to send in your HD to a data recovery shop. You will be spending a minimum of $1000 for data recovery.

 

[zerodeefex]

restorer 2000 > *

It will LOOK and copy files from partitions without writing or anything so you dont accidentally screw things up worse. Get the pro edition, it's the only one that will find all the lost partitions and restore your stuff, its $50. They have a demo which will do the scanning but won't restore you files, but you can at least see if the program will work for you or not with the trial. One of the best $50 I have spent in a long time.

 

[Chronoshock]

Once again I shall recommend PC Inspector File recovery. If all you did was mess up the partiton table and the data itself is still there, this will work fine. NOTE: This program is FREEWARE!!! Which is very very different from almost all other file recovery programs out there. Definetly try this one first, it worked for me perfectly!

 

[Elcs]

Originally posted by: eelw
$79 is steep??? How poor a student are you? Lucky that you didn't have a HW failure and you needed to send in your HD to a data recovery shop. You will be spending a minimum of $1000 for data recovery.

Anything to a student is expensive except partying. Take it from a student.

Even though I nor my family has to pay university fees and I get financial aid by way of loans, I cant afford to go spending £50 willy-nilly on things. If I did (which some people do), Id be out of cash very quickly.

Imyourzero, I hope you get back all of your critical files. I can appreciate how bad it must be if you could lose some important work.

 

[ampiere]

Before you decide what to, just keep in mind that DONT COPY ANY FILES INTO YOUR MAXTOR or otherwise it will overwrite you data and will be much much much more harder to get them back!

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: ampiere
Before you decide what to, just keep in mind that DONT COPY ANY FILES INTO YOUR MAXTOR or otherwise it will overwrite you data and will be much much much more harder to get them back!

Definitely - write nothing at all to the disk, or else your chances of recovering data go down drastically.

Anyway, try the demo of R-Studio. It'll let you see the files, but it won't let you recover anything over 64KB. If all you did was Fdisk it and nothing else, there's a good chance it'll be able to recover everything.

Or search Google.