file recovery software

Help! I was going through the proccess of formatting my windows hard drive and forgot about my external harddrive with all my pics was still pugged in to usb port. long story short i deleted my external hard drive partition by pressing "D" and "L". I did not format it though and was hoping there might be a way to recover those pics(thousands of them) any advice would be MUCH appreciated. thanks

 

thanks for the reply. Was using windows seveven and the hard drive with the pics is a 1tb external.

 

Hi,

I just tried Partition Wizard working on a USB flash drive where I deleted the partition and then recovered it.

It worked fine, except I had to go into Disk Management afterwards and assign a letter to the drive to make it visible.

The instruction in that second link are about right. When the program opens select the disk # in the graph section so that it is highlighted (you are clinking on the words Disk # --where # is a number for the usb drive).
Select Partition Recovery from the left pane.
Select Full Disk then next
Select Quick option then next
When it lists all your partitions check each box. You want all the boxes checked.
Click Finish
Then click Apply button at the top of the window.
After it is finished right click the new partition under your Disk # and select Explore. Do you see your files?

If so then we can try to get Windows to see the drive again.
Remove the USB and reinsert it. See if it is recognized. If not we will need to go one more step but let me know if you see your files.

 

thanks a million for all u peeps help. Im gonna try to recover later on tonight after all the holiday stuff slows down here. i will report back later. thx again.

 

Tried it and it doesnt see the files. They should be there though because I didnt format anything. Im really gonna take my time with this cause I dont want to mess up more than I have already.

 

ok tried it again and I can see the files, but drive doesnt show up in windows..

 

Type disk management <enter button> in the Start Search Box of Win7. In the Window that opens you should see your USB drive. Right click it and choose "Change Drive letter and paths". Click Add button. And select a drive letter and see if Windows will assign it the drive letter and make it accessible.

 

It doesnt give me the option to change drive letter and paths. Here are the options it gives: New simmple volume...
New spanned volume...
New striped volume...
New mirrorred volume...

 

also gives the option to "convert to dynamic disk" and "convert to GPT disk" It does give an option to change drive letter in partition wizard though. Do you think that would work??

 

I'm not sure here. I'll do it again on my Flash drive to see what the options are. Edit: Did you hit the Apply button in Partition Wizard? After you recovered the partition?

You have only one partition on the HD?

 

yep it was 1tb no partition that i recall

 

I edited my last post. Did you hit the Apply button in PW?

 

It can't hurt to assign the drive letter in PW. I just did and Windows recognized it in Explorer.

 

not yet. my operations pending are 1.Partition recovery on disk 2 and 2. change letter: (Disk 2 partition 1...)

 

Looks like that did it!! You dont know how grateful I am for your help! thank you very very much!

 

That should work. Go ahead and Apply. [I had assumed you Applied the recovery before doing Disk Management but PW can do it all.]

 

Good work! That darned Apply button is easy to forget. I've done it myself many times because the refreshed window makes it look like the operation has completed.

 

Yep and Those pics were all soo important to me and my family (years of memories at least half of which i didnt have backups) I was very stressed and not thinking clearly lol. Thanks again!