ddeleted primary partion on external hard drive

Help I deleted all the partitions on an external hard drive by accident. The drive spins up and is listed in the device manager but windows does not assign a drive letter. Is there anyway to reinstall the partition? Thanks

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major

Yes, To temporarily access the data so you can move it to another drive, or burn it to CDs/DVDs, you can use Partiton Find-n-Mount. It's easy to use, but I recommend changing the default drive letter it will assign (it usually uses drive A: or B: ) and use a higher letter like X: or Y:. To permanently 'undelete' the partition, you can create a bootable disc of BootIt Next Generation. Then boot to it, enter 'Maintenance Mode' by choosing to NOT install it to the hard drive, then select "Partition Work", then select the drive you want to repair, then select "Undelete" (I think it's called "Undelete"; I haven't used it in awhile). Then save the changes and exit the program and reboot to Windows, and the drive should be OK. You may want to use the first method with 'Partition Find-n-Mount' to back up the really important stuff first just in case the 2nd method using 'BootIt' doesn't work, or somehow makes things worse (which is basically impossible if you're careful, but you never know with PCs).
Good luck! Keep us posted!

:-D

[dlb]

 

Thanks for the info. I do need some help. I do not know how to make a bootable cd Can you give me a walkthru on the procedure?

 

If the download of Bootit has the extension .ISO, after you unzip it, it is an image file. It will probably be bootable so all you need to worry about is burning the ISO.

I use a free program called ImgBurn to burn all my ISOs.
http://majorgeeks.com/ImgBurn_d4870.html
Install it, make sure it is the default for ISOs. Open up ImgBurn, it will find your burner(s) and ask what you want to burn.

 

Thanks I will try to undo the deletion tommorrow. The only question I have is will I be able to access the external, usb drive from the boot it software?

 

Re: deleted primary partion on external hard drive

It doesn't. You have to make one manually.

Yes but you will have to enable it after the prog has booted in dos. There will be an option to enable USB2 support (never tried it with USB1.x)

Good Luck

 

risk_reversal, maybe you need to explain for the OP how to either make an ISO or make the BootItNG bootable. I've never used it so can not begin to give a step by step.