posted
Alright, the short and simple story is Feyd was pushed into a situation he wasn't comforatble with but said nothing, and has now really stuck his foot in it.
While attempting to format a blank hard-drive and prep for a new computer, errors occured. Sometime during the process one of the two partitions on the primary hard drive got thwapped (by either WD Data Lifeguard or by a partial wipe by windows format). Sadly, the OS (Win 2000 Pro) had it's documents and settings on this partition, but not the windows installation. I need those files back. Everything on that drive would like to have back.
Since this occured, nothing else has been written to the hard drive, primarily out of sheer panic on my part. I know there are programs that can attempt to recover formatted partitions. My question to you all is do you know an effective one? Do you have a favorite that's saved your @#$ in the past?
I've been browsing the demos, and while they all have a 64k - 1mb limit on rescuing files, some will create an image of the formatted partition, and restore it upon purchase of full version of said program. Is this something I should do immediately? (I'm going to assume yes if I hear nothing before tomorrow morning, and use R-Studio on yet a thrid computer to create an image of the FUBARed partition. Then I'll see about preferred programs to restore, and if that doesn't work I'll use the original program to attempt a rescue on the disk imgae.
*sigh* I hate computers (but I am laughing at that parody Mac commercial that's running through my head.)
Feyd Baron, DoC (C obviously does not mean computers)
posted
Okay, hopefully just your partition table got trashed. Easiest way to restore this is with the Guess Partition utility on Linux.
I don't know how comfortable you are with linux or the command line, but the procedure is simple. I outline it here in broad strokes:
Boot from a Linux LiveCD with gpart, almost certainly Knoppix.
Open up a (root) terminal.
Run gpart /dev/[whichever disk identifier, likely hdx, is present]
Look at the proposed partition table, and see if it fits what you think it should look like.
If so, run gpart -W /dev/hdx /dev/hdx
This will restore your partition table, as gpart proposed.
Since you have the capability, I'd create a low level copy (using dd) of the partition to another drive, before proceeding.
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