Recover Lost Partition Info

[RizzKid]

I've got a Dell Dimension 9200 running XP, with a single SATA disk drive containing the usual two Dell partitions and my C: drive. I hooked up an external drive and used Ghost to set up partitions on the external drive, but goofed, and updated the partition table on my internal drive instead. Not knowing what the original partition values were, is there any way in the world to reestablish the partition table so I can access at least my C: drive?

 

[rgd1101]

http://www.partition-tool.com/partition-recovery-wizard/

 

[RizzKid]

Ok, but where to install it? Obviously I can't run Windows from that drive in the state it's in. I can connect the badly-partitioned drive to another Windows system as a USB drive, but if I install and run Partition Tool there, will it deal with the USB drive or the boot drive?

 

[Hawkeye22]

The partition tool will look at whatever drive you tell it to. Install it on the working computer's drive since it doesn't make sense to install it on the drive you are trying to recover partitions from.

 

[RizzKid]

Thanks. One more question: Before I use the partition tool, I'd like to save the contents of the bad drive just in case anything goes wrong. Right now Ghost doesn't see any partitions on the drive, thus won't back it up. Any suggestion on what can be done temporarily with the drive so I'll be able to back it up (and presumably restore it to its current state if necessary)?

 

[rgd1101]

oh. you could try the hiren's boot cd, there are partition recovery tools, but not sure if any of them can be run off the cd.
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

 

[rgd1101]

something like this?
http://www.hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/
or check out the hiren cd.

 

[Hawkeye22]

You can try clonezilla. I'm not sure if it will have the same problem as ghost.

http://clonezilla.org/

 

[RizzKid]

Best answer selected by RizzKid.

 

[RizzKid]

Thanks so much. I tried HDDGuru, but didn't have enough contiguous external drive space to back up the 250GB drive. So I went ahead with Partition Master. At first it wouldn't let me recover anything as there was no unallocated space -- since my partition table had entries in it. So I used Ghost to zero out the partition table, tried PM once again, and sure 'nuff, it found all three partitions and allowed me to recover them. Then I went back to Ghost to set the special disk codes for the Dell partitions. I have since booted Windows successfully and have all my files back intact.

I am immensely grateful to you and the Partition Master authors.