Partition Recovery
Hello folks. I made a bad mistake on a client’s machine. I was going to reformat Windows XP and booted the Windows XP CD. I got to the dialogue where it allows you to create or delete hard disk partitions. Anyway I deleted the wrong partition. I realized this right away and quickly quit the setup without formatting anything. The partition now is obviously not available in the Windows explorer. I must have deleted the whole file system but the files should still be intact. Does anyone know any good free partition recovery tools? I lost 20 gigs of my client’s media.
And felt like a jackass. It all happened so quickly. Does anybody have any advice at all? I'm out of my comfort zone here and I'd like to recover the partition and/or files ASAP. Thanks a great deal for anyone and everyone’s help here. You've always been great.
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Anyway Thrax, you should continue recommending TestDisk to people because if it could work for me it could work for anyone. Cheers friend!
Now, when a partition goes bad, it simply means that the dividing structure of the partition has gone bad on a software level. The MFT can still identify all your files as being in x physical location on the drive. It's a bit like putting two balls next to one another, and then penning them off. You are the MFT because you can see both balls, so even if you kick down one of the walls, you know that the ball is still physically there. By that effect, a hard disk can be read and a partition can be recreated from the information stored in the MFT.
Furthermore, programs can look at something called the geometry of the drive, which is "Are there any tell-tale signs (at a mechanical level) that data has been stored here?" Programs can go through a disk and look for signs of data being written just like you can flip over a CD-R and see the colour differentiation to notice that something has been written. Comparing the drive geometry to the MFT, a truly accurate partition can be created.
No files are truly ever deleted unless new data has been written over the top, and even then, there are magnetic ghosts of the old, old data lingering on the disk.