Recovering a deleted partition off an external

[keiranj85]

Hello,
Could really do with some help guys. Last night i was sorting out the wifes computer. I forgot to remove my external HD. Soooo When it came to installing windows on her system i deleted the partition off the wrong drive, but wait there's more, then i created a new partition thinking it was the version of windows i was using (that equated to the massive total of capacity) Its allowed me to do this but wouldn't format so like an idiot i repeated the same process as it wouldn't allow formatting.
Then i realized the mistake on the next screen. the x86 error. Now i need to know how to get it back, there is years of my life on that drive.

I'm currently using active partition recovery its only around 35gig into the process out of 2tb so going to be a long wait, but should i be able to recover?? The website suggests using smart scan then when it finds the partition use recovery?? will it matter that i deleted and created a few times?? any better software out there???

 

[chad2625]

I have not used this software before, nor have I tried to recover a Partition before. But from my understading of partitions, the Data Should still be on the drive but the information that tells the drive where the data is stored is gone. This program is most likely going to rebuild that information based off of the data on the disk. The good news is if you did not write anything, eg copy any files, or install windows on it you should be able to recover everything. This is going to be a terribly long process tho.

 

[chad2625]

Arent you using a program already? No I don't think you doing several time, will hurt anything. Hard drives work kinda like Houses and maps, houses are built, but there is a map that tells you how to get to that house. Only in Hardrives houses are one and zeros, and the map is a file table. So when you format your computer, 99.999% all your doing is deleting that table. When that table is gone, the data is still on the disk but your computer can't "see it". Your computer goes on writing data to the drive as if it were blank. What this program dose is look at the location on the disk instead of the Table, and makes a table that your computer will then recognize. If before that table gets rebuilt you changed any thing by using the hard drive then there will be data loss. So if you did not use the disk, Copy anything to it your fine.

 

[keiranj85]

Ive not formatted it at all, Just made the mistake of reading the wrong drive, the system actually has a 2tb internal so i read the information wrong when deleting it, then created a new partition but only realised on the next screen what id done. Ive made this mistake once in the past as well but was always able to recover the data, then reformat/partition the disk. However this time nothing recovery wise will read the disk. Its showing in active and test disk all the right information, just not in my computer, Having real issues with it up to now active got to 70% then windows update reset in the middle of the night (i think because it had reset when id come back to it and couldn't see no error), to say I'm annoyed is an understatement, I tried going for a quicker route to just see what information i could read if any, using testdisk that finds 3 partitions but no boot sectors on each and reads the information as bad. Also two of the partitions are fat12 one ntfs. I tried to rebuild the ntfs one with no luck it reads boot is ok but still cannot access the drive. I'm giving up somewhat on the idea of recovering my data. But now i can't get windows to find the drive, i loaded partition magic and it is highlighted yellow (other) with "bad" across the info but wont let me do a single thing.

 

[keiranj85]

Ok so after 2 days its found 4 partitions with Active Partition Recovery but wont let me recover them! it says "Device Type is not supported"
"Disk has no MBR, or Sector Size is invalid, or Media Type is not
supported (CD-ROM, Floppy, Remote, etc).
"Supported only Fixed and Removable disk media types"

I can see labeled partition 0 the info and the dates match up with when i 1st got it so i know thats the one! How do i recover it???

 

[Hawkeye22]

Easeus partition recovery may work. Since you deleted and recreated the partition several times, I'm not sure how well it will work.

http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/