Vista - Anyone know how to recover lost partitions?

There are or used to be low level disk editors that you could use to look at
what was on the disk sector by sector. I had the Norton version of one back
in the DOS days. DOS "deleted" files by changing the first character of the
file name to "?". when you found the file name of the file that you wanted
to recover, you just changed the "?" to whatever you wanted it to be, and
the file was restored.

I believe that you could only use it to look at data in a partitioned space
that had a drive letter though. I don't know if there is anything that you
could use to look at an unpartitioned space or not. And you would have to
know what the partition header looked like to find it, and you would have to
know what to change to restore it.

Data recovery places have such utilities, and know how to use them to
restore partitions, but I don't know where to get one except to write it
yourself. And then you would still have to know how to use it.

Todd

"Raven Mill" <nospammingdammit> wrote in message
news:e8dfZlntGHA.5032@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
>
> "Todd" <Noname@NoSpam.invalid> wrote in message
> news:ePY5fiktGHA.5056@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...
> > Maybe I didn't understand the original question, but I thought it was:
> >
> > There is data on the hard drive, and the partition that the data was in
> > has
> > been deleted, or otherwise lost.
> >
> > Even though the partition has been deleted, the data should still be on
> > the
> > hard drive.
> >
> > Can the partition be recreated so that the files can be accessed?
> >
> > Is there some other way to access the files without recreating the
> > partition?
> >
> > I believe he also asked about recovery services, which I think is
probably
> > his best bet. If he starts repartitioning his hard drive, he could
> > overwrite his data.
>
> Right...that's what I was trying to say before...
>
> REpartitioning the drive will result in lost data.
>
> If the partitions are lost, and osl2k is the culprit, then they are
probably
> just HIDDEN and need to be SHOWn
>
> Under NO circumstances shoult the partition be WRITTEN to
>
> Chances are, the partition table is not recoverable, but that is okay as
> long as the DATA can be recovered, the partitions can be reconfigured
AFTER
> the data is safe...
>
>

Raven Mill wrote:
>
> Chances are, the partition table is not recoverable, but that is okay as
> long as the DATA can be recovered, the partitions can be reconfigured AFTER
> the data is safe...
>
>

It was the partition tables that were corrupted. The data was fine but
appeared to be in unallocated space on the drive. I used Active
Partition Recovery to repair the partition table and was then able to
move the data to another drive.

Raven Mill wrote:
>
> I just tried osl a few days ago and found it to be absolutely worthless for
> the needs of us testing vista, as it has no ntldr file associated directly
> with it...
>

I had used it about 5 years ago and it was fine then. But I agree it is
not good with Vista and should come with a warning.

Great news!

"Bernie" <bernie@nospam.org> wrote in message
news:%23Csv0VIuGHA.1284@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> Raven Mill wrote:
>>
>> Chances are, the partition table is not recoverable, but that is okay as
>> long as the DATA can be recovered, the partitions can be reconfigured
>> AFTER the data is safe...
>>
>>
>
> It was the partition tables that were corrupted. The data was fine but
> appeared to be in unallocated space on the drive. I used Active Partition
> Recovery to repair the partition table and was then able to move the data
> to another drive.