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PROBLEM SOLVED. THANKS. Help! I accidently deleted a partition with FDISK.

T

Tol

Senior member
I'm hoping there's a way for me to recover data on my mom's harddrive. I was trying to repartition a drive that I sold so that I could ship it out, but I forgot to switch disks before I deleted the partition.

Is there any software, hopefully a free version, somewhere out there that I can use to restore the partition and data?
 
Tol,

The good news, as you're hoping, is that the filesystem is still on the disk even though the OS can't find it.

The bad news is that editing the partition table to "resurrect" this partition is not an easy process. You'll have to fill in appropriate fields in the partition table either by hand or with a utility if one can be found.

Was this a primary partition or an extended partition?

The only partition on the drive?

Was it the full size of the drive?

What was the filesystem?

If this was the only partition on the drive and it was a primary partition and it consumed the whole drive, this would be the easiest scenario. I'm busy at work right now, but go ahead and answer these questions and I'll see if I can provide guidance.

(Do you have another machine running that you can pop this drive in to?)

 
The partition was the only one on the drive, and it was primary. It was also the full size of the drive and FAT32 using win98se.

I'm using my friend's computer running win2k right now. I can plug the drive in there very easily, and I brought along a win98se bootdisk as well.

Thanks
 
Going through my Google search results, I think I've gained a basic understanding of what is going to have to be done.

This guy http://members.tripod.com/~diligent/harddisk.htm seems to infer that a program called part.exe will be able to rebuild my partition as long as I have the CHS values. Part.exe shows me something like 1023/16/16 for those values, and on my drive, the values are 4092/16/63. I'm guessing the difference here is related to FDISK's opening screen about using large harddrives and those different modes that older BIOSs show...Normal, LBA, etc. ?

I don't want to run that wizard in part.exe until I see what you have to say, NogginBoink. It said something about being a format wizard, and I don't want to go forward until I know exactly what that wizard does. Part.exe does give a nice tabled listing of this computer's main drive...starting sectors for each partition, and such. I just didn't see a way to input values.
 
Well...part.exe did the trick. I just had to hit INS to insert the filesystem type and size. Thanks again, NogginBoink. Your questions helped refresh my memories from that A+ class I took. =)

That's the first new computer problem I've had in a long time...It sure is exhilarating when you solve them...
 
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