Calling desktop support, help. I accidentally deleted my back up drive's partition.

[rnln]

Should I cry?
Recently, I feel my computer is a little slow. I decided to try the 30 days window 7. It actually freezed once in a while. Then I decided to go back to WinXP. During the installation process, I accidentally deleted the partition of my back up hard drive.
I have not formated it. Is there any thing I can do to get files on this drive back?

[id10t]

There is a secondary partition table, you may be able to do something with the forensics tools in BackTrack. You can download BT and burn it to disk from my mirror - Index of /iso/backtrack

[red-beard]

If all you want is the drive operational:

You need to pull up "Administrative Tools". It is accessible through the "Control Panel".

Slected "Computer Management"

Under the "Storage" you will find "Disk Management" Click on that

You should now be able to see the different drives and one will show it is not partioned. Right click on the drive that needs to be partioned and formated and follow the directions.

Of course the data is gone....

[tharbert]

Originally Posted by red-beard

...Of course the data is gone....

Not necesarily... There are ways to recover files from deleted partitions if you haven't zeroed or formatted. And even if you did, you can still get some of it. When you delete the partition, you simply delete the partition table, the table of contents so to speak. There is software that will scan every sector of the drive and piece back together the table and allow you to recover files.

That said, if it was a backup and you have the files restored already, don't bother. Recovery is a time consuming process depending on how successful the recovery software was at it's job. That's why recovery services cost SO MUCH.

[red-beard]

Originally Posted by red-beard

Of course the data is gone....

Originally Posted by tharbert

Not necesarily...

Using the proceedure I outlined, the data will be gone. If it is simply a backup drive, and he doesn't need the backed up data, my proceedure will work. If he needs to recover the data, he will need to use some special tools to get the original partition table back.

[rnln]

id10t,
thanks. I downloaded your backtrack5 and did some searches but couldn't find the feature that fit my purpose. Maybe it's there, but hard to find. After several nights of searched and tried several programs, I finally found Testdisk and it works perfect and it's completely free. Thank God.

red-beard, thanks James. I need my files more than the physical hard drive. Lucky, I stopped and think for a second when I was at disk management. If I did the partition and format it, I'll be hanging myself now . But thanks for the good intention.

thanks tharbert, yes, this is the back up drive, but I delete partition tables on all of the drive, and formated the C:\ drive.

For the record, if any of us run into this situation in the future... accidentally delete hard drive partition, bad sector, accidentally delete file, the program called testdisk might help. Best thing about it is easy to use, and is totally FREE.

My problem, accidentally delete the hard drive's partition. I stopped on time. I didn't re-partition it, and didn't format it.
My Solution, free but take time:
- because I don't have window on the computer by the time I delete my "backup" drive's partition, I have to partition and format C:\ drive, install window as usual. If your C:\ drive and window is still ok, you don't have to do this step.
- download testdisk program from here: TestDisk Download - CGSecurity
.... + here is instruction with images, the easiest instruction I have read. For my purpose, I can skip some of the "deep searches" steps: TestDisk Step By Step - CGSecurity
Notes: in the middle of the process, I tried to copy files before repairing the partition table but copy didn't work. After repaired the partition table, during reboot, I crossed my fingers. and now I am happy.