Hard Drive Data Recovery EMERGENCY.

Hello. I have recently had to reinstall windows xp home on my computer. all data was both copied and backup to an external USB hard drive 160G. After installing winXP on computer, the USB HD partition was accidently removed. My computer has a 40G which is partioned to C: and D: 20G each. I attempted to repartition the USB drive and is renamed F: It shows up on the computer, however when I try to access it windows promts to format. I HAVE NOT DONE SO OR DONE ANYTHING ELSE TO CAUSE DATA BEING PERMENANTLY LOST. The partitions shows up as RAW.

What I need is a top grade data recovery program that will help or if anyone knows of a way to recover the partition. I'm stuck and desperately need some expert assistance.

I've looked at the following programs trying to decide which is best all have good ratings on site, but I want to be sure of using the best program. This Data is critical don't want to make any more mistakes.
File Scavenger® Version 3
GetDataBack for NTFS
Active@Partition Recovery

Thanks for your help anyone. Hope I haven't blown it all together.
Batman004ever

 

RAW = forget about it

 

Sorry but you are out of luck!!!! Anytime you lose a partition, or intentionally delete a partition...you lose everything in the partition for good!!!!!

Roger

 

Thanks to all for your feedback and help on this subject. After review of a number of programs and looking at partition and data restoring, I found that the best solution was to get a commercial program that was cost effective and provided the most comprehensive set of tools for the job. Data partition programs in themselves do not offer the best solution. I found the best course of action was a comprehensive data recovery tool, which forces you to really take the time to do a proper data analysis. (my opinion only)



File Scavenger 3.0 http://www.snapfiles.com/features/filescavenger-803-406688.php was my choice. I did a complete exhaustive search on the hard drive and followed their instructions as posted on their site and documents and was amazed at its capability to search every sector and bring up the lost files in a tree format with easy to restore instructions and safeguards. The tree format shows the original directories and folders and you can sort them by name, or folder or size etc. Makes it easy to pick and chose critical data vs. junk files and other non required items. The cost ($45 USD, single user) was cheap relative to other more expensive programs.

Added benefit is they have a number to call and talk to a tech to help if required.



Lesson I learned and keys to successful data recovery.

1. Stop any action (in my case the drive was a USB hard drive used for backup of files and in this case all my critical files were transfered there before I reformated my Computer hard drive)

2. Use another computer with the Data Recovery program (most preferred method)

3. Use the full sector scan capability to go through entire disk and review all recovered files. This is the most time consuming (took about 3 hours) but is most recommended to ensure a comprehensive search and to ensure the highest probability of success.

4. Transfer data to another hard drive and do not use the damaged/reformated hard drive for a few weeks, while you check the integrity of your rcovered files as you use them.

5. In the future be patient and take proper precautions when reformating disks. I was smart enough to invest in a good secondary quality hard drive and religious in performing daily back ups which ultimately saved me from loosing all this critical data.

 

Hey thats good news . Pretty cheap too

 

I was in the same (or similar) boat to you the other day, I was installing Xp SP2 in my pc, but it (for some reason) corrupted "My Documents" where I keep everything. I used PC Inspector File Recovery (freeware) to recover all but one file to my HDD. I was lucky I didn't lose any compositions or remixes, as they're my most valued data. Now i just have to remove the corrupted data from my HDD (8GB worth of it ). i'm gonna try Delete Doctor tonight, wish me luck!

 

Great stuff....let me know how it turns out. I've heard to PC Inspector, looks good. All this keeps reinforcing the need to backup critical data at all times before doing any reformating, reinstalls maintence etc. Thanks for the note/reply.