Serious tech help needed

[LightPhoenix]

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[LightPhoenix]

Okay, update time.

My suspicions are correct - my FAT was overwritten, and the good news is that I think most of my stuff will be recoverable.

The problem now is, I'm a little unsure how to go about recovering the data. Are there any exceptional, but free or inexpensive file recovery programs that someone might be able to point me toward?

 

[LightPhoenix]

Mwahaha, I need none of you!!!!

Well, I managed to recover my E: drive, which had all my important stuff on it. Yay!!!

I failed to recover my D: drive, which had all of my music on it, including about two and half years worth of personal compositions. Boo!!!

 

[Ashtal]

Eek! I would consider the loss of the D: drive, with your personal work, a greater blow!

Still, glad to hear you've kind of resolved your problems.

 

[LightPhoenix]

Indeed. Actually though there is one more problem.

I'm not entirely convinced the D: partition is gone.

You see, my HD is 40 GB - however the E: drive was 30 GB and the D: was 10 GB.

I've recovered the E: drive, though it's now listed as D:. It also says that it is only 30 GB, when I know the drive is 40 GB. Analysis with Norton Utilities shows two FAT files found on the drive. Even so, I can't even see that last 10GB, let alone recover it.

Any ideas how I might be able to get to it?

 

[Thanee]

Havn't had such trouble yet fortunately, but if the recovering tools won't work, maybe you could try something like Partition Magic (or does fdisk suffice? I don't think so) to change the size of the lost partition.

Perhaps (this is purely theoretical) it will rework the allocation tables and all the stuff necessary to get to the data and you can access it afterwards?

Bye
Thanee

 

[LightPhoenix]

fdisk will require a complete reformat of the drive, something I don't want to do just yet, both because I hope there's still a chance that more data is recoverable, and because I haven't had the chance to do a back up yet, and also because that last 10 GB was just my music collection, most of which I have on CD. Only my personal stuff would be gone.

 

[Xeriar]

fdisk will require a complete reformat of the drive, something I don't want to do just yet, both because I hope there's still a chance that more data is recoverable, and because I haven't had the chance to do a back up yet, and also because that last 10 GB was just my music collection, most of which I have on CD. Only my personal stuff would be gone.

You could take it to a data recovery shop, which can cost $300 or more.

I don't know of any utility that could actually rebuild a FAT file system. There are some utilities floating around that could make the attempt, but if it's a large, often-used partition... good luck.

Try google, maybe.