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recovering data from lost partition - HOWTO?

Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 9:17 am
by lexje
Hi forum,

I have a laptop hd of 160 GB. It is partitioned in several partitions using various filesystems, most NTFS and Linux.
One of the first if not the first partition was a Vista partition.
Off and on I have been using BootITng as a boot manager.
Now and again I install 'some' operating system to do some tests.
Most of the time the new OS overwrites MBR and thus BootIT does not come up anymore.
I realize at such moment I should recover BootIT asap with it's own install disk/CD
But as it happened the OS bootmanager that installed also functioned quite well so, no immediate reason to reactivate BootIT.
Now it seems my Vista partition has disappeared / become invisible.

I took out the hd and connected it to a desktop PC and let R-Studio do a discovery.
The result is in the attached screenshot.

It seems most of the Vista files are still there.

Now my question:
What approach would you recommend to salvage this data?
Any chance to recover the complete partition and make it bootable again?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Erwin
(Using R-Studio 2.0 build 121047)

PS. I seem to be unable to upload screenshots.
Also seems linking is disabled also...
So instead have a look here: http://www.ipanini.com/R-Studio/index.htm

Re: recovering data from lost partition - HOWTO?

Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 12:32 pm
by Alt
My recommendation is the follows:
1. Recover files from the Vista partition (as I understand, it's Recognized 11). I'd use the latest version of R-Studio.
You may find this on-line documentation helpful: http://www.unformat-unerase.com/Unforma ... index.html
2. Make an image of the disk using our R-Drive Image ( http://www.drive-image.com/ ).
3. Re-create the Vista partition.
4. Restore the rest partitions using R-Drive Image.

Re: recovering data from lost partition - HOWTO?

Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2009 2:34 pm
by lexje
Alt,

Thanks for replying.
Before acting I'd like to dig a bit deeper if possible.
I don't know if you had a look at the screenshots I posted in the link?

As it is I have:
Recognized 11 - NTFS - start 1MB - end 1.5GB
Recognized 12 - NTFS - start 1.5 GB - end 24.4 GB
Recognized 13 - NTFS - start 25.9 GB - end 24.4 GB
Recognized 14 - NTFS - start 50.3 GB - end 24.4 GB
Recognized 18 - NTFS - start 118.6 GB - end 19.5 GB

How will I guarantee file / directory / partition consistency?

Re: recovering data from lost partition - HOWTO?

Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 6:59 am
by Alt
Yes, I saw the screenshot. I made the guess about Recognized 11.
You may use file preview to verify that this is the required partition and files can be successfully recovered from it.
See: http://www.unformat-unerase.com/Unforma ... index.html -> Data Recovery Using R-Studio -> Basic File Recovery -> Previewing Files.