I'm in trouble

[Clonedsheep]

      Hi guys, I messed up bit time. I was going to reinstall windows xp into my main computer and I went to format the drive and I deleted both partitions, my master and slave.  I did type L to confirm. I realized what I did as I didn't want to delete my slave drive partition. I did not format it. I reinstalled windows to the master drive but now I don't know how to bring back my data from my slave. I am at the point where windows sees the slave drive but if I click it, it asks if I want to reformat it. I messed up...I have never done such a thing before. I usually just unplug the slave drive as a safety measure if it is that important. I am panicing and I am worried. All of my family pictures and important data is on this slave drive. I am using my arcade computer to type this. Perhaps you guys know of a free and trusted program I could use to restore the partition. Please help me guys and tell me it's going to be alright. thank you 

[orion]

I have never tried these programs before, but they are open source which in my experience is usually pretty good software. If I were you I would try this program first which finds deleted files. If it looks like its going to work make sure you save your data to another harddrive. http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/12/02/recover-deleted-files-with-ntfs-undelete/

If this doesn't work try something like this http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk  Like I said though, I have never used such a program as I usually try to back up all my important stuff in multiple places. Hopefully someone will chime who has some experience with this type of situation.

[Clonedsheep]

Thank you for that. I will start checking it out. It just sucks because I have to wait till tomorrow to pick up another network card for my main computer. (i lost the driver apparently). To top it off, my little usb drive is not working in my Arcade computer. What a night!

[ChadTower]

I clicked on this expecting something so much worse than a PC problem. 

[Ginsu Victim]

Same.

[SirPeale]

Same.

[Kevin Mullins]

Now go to your room.



Why not find the driver for your network card off the internet ?
Instead of waiting to buy a new card.

[Franco B]

Yeah, here I was about to bust out my "don't answer any more of the police questions" or "she can't force you to take a paternity test if you leave the state, nice knowing you" routines.

 

Thats EXACTLY what I was thinking. Oh god, thats bad isn't it 

[SavannahLion]

To begin with, stop using Windows. It's a despicable OS that pokes around on hard drives when the drive is in no state to be poked around with.

That said, you have two choices. I think a tool like TestDisk might work for you. Based on the tool description, it seems to be the correct one. I have copies of the tool with Slax, Knoppix, and UBCD so it's readily available and easy to find. I've never personally used it, my HDD problems are usually a lot larger than just a lost artition table. Give it a shot.

Alternatively, you can do what I'm doing right now with a drive and blindly pull the entire drive data into a seperatedrive so you can work with it properly. The process is ugly and takes some real work. Not really for the faint of heart. DD and variants are the key to that. In your case, I would use it as a last ditch effort. Don't use the "intelligent" processors like CloneZilla (unless it has TestDisk, I'm not sure), it probably won't do what you want.

[DaveMMR]

Is it too late for me to say "same"?

[protokatie]

I know this is a little "after the fact", but for your future safety net, I suggest getting an external 1TB HD (120 or so bucks at buy.com) and backup regularly. I just had to send in my laptop (still under warranty, luckily) and they say they may have to reformat the drive. Luckily I have 2 1TB drives that I just copy all the stuff I want to keep as a backup. (To make it easier on myself, I have those drives networked, with one as a shared volume and the other as an unshared backup that runs a backup batch file once a day).

If you can find an unformat program, it will get all your files back, albeit in the root directory.

[RayB]

I wonder if running CHKDSK would rebuild his MBR and fix it?