OT: Recovering deleted partition in extnl HD?

ken c wrote on 10/27/2006, 4:57 AM

Hi -

In one of my western digital 300 gig hard drives, I suddenly have a deleted partition and windows explorer says "drive not formatted/format now.."..

It may well be a virus, though norton/spysweeper couldn't find anything..

I am trying to use a (great) program at www.active-undelete.com .. but it takes forever to read the missing sector's subdirectories, and it would take days to recover all the files manually like this... but at least I *can* get to the data..

I've tried using the HD on another pc/laptop, and reinstalling its drivers, but no-go.. it looks like a virus or something deleted the main partition. Now I can still "get at" the data using that undelete utility, but it would take 2 weeks to restore it all to another drive at the rate it's all going.. any ideas?

The acronis disk director and win2k computer console LDM service all now report the drive in RAW format, not even formatted, though it has been and was working fine til recently..

I'm hesitant to clear the partition table and re-read it, in case it gets lost. (geez I sound like a computer nerd eh? lol.. guess I'm learning all this stuff)..

Anyone have any tips on restoring deleted partitions on external drives? Been there, done that?

Much appreciated,

Ken

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 10/27/2006, 6:45 AM

Do a search for "GetDataBack". It's a great little program that i've used it to recover almost all data from a drive that mounted as "unformatted". It recovered 140GB in about 4 hours. It's still slow, but a lot faster than what you're doing now.

TLF wrote on 10/27/2006, 6:51 AM

I've used File Scavenger when my disk corrupted immediately after creating my first DVDA project.

It successfully recovered all but one file... the one I had just finished editing >D'OH!<

I have only just completed re-editing 5 hours of DV tapes and re-creating the projects.

Worley

ken c wrote on 10/27/2006, 2:22 PM

Thanks for the tips, I'll try those..

ken