Urgent help required

A

Ankit Dayal

Regular
Messages
154
Location
NA
ISP
MTNL Freedom 995
I have a 80 GB Samsung Hard Disk.I have 5 partitions C,D,E,F and G. Up until a few hours ago I had Windows XP SP2 on drive C and Windows XP Dark Edition on drive G.I decided to reinstall my windows, so i formatted drive c,d and f. Drive e had all my music collection worth 20 gb so i did not format it.I thought I would burn it onto a dvd later.After formatting those 3 drives i installed windows xp sp2 on c drive and when everything was done, to my horror i found out that somehow all my disk partitions were empty. All data from drive e and g had been deleted. I have no clue how.Can anybody tell me what went wrong?I have done this before as well but nothing has ever gone wrong.Is there anyway i can retrieve my lost data?I collected all that music for three years.
 
Hi,

When you install 2 OSs on 2 drive letters, each of them will be visible with the drive letter as C, when you are logged on to that OS. So, when you log in using OS1, the drive letter where the 2nd OS is installed in, will appear as, say, Drive D. When you log into OS2, its drive letter will appear as C and not D and the other drive letters may also change. So you may have inadvertently formatted the ones you didn't want to when you logged into the second OS.

There are many utilities that help you recover data from formatted disks; some can even do it after 3 or 4 formats. But it is a painstaking task and will need a lot of patience:wall:. I use the NTFS utility quite extensively. It is free, just follow the link below. Data Recovery Software by NTFS.com LiveCD (DOS & WinPE), NTFS DOS and more...

There are many chut operators who provide data recovery services, charges vary. You can google for Delhi or you can take your disk to Nehru Place where there are many guys doing just that.

A tip: An 80 gig disk is too small for 4 partitions in this age of gig files. At the max keep 2 partitions. You can use partitionmagic to remove/merge partitions depending on whether you have data on thme (you DL it from many torrents available on the net). I would also suggest to go in for an additonal disk (recommend a 300-500 gig one @approx 8-9 bucks a gig). This will provide you with a physically seperate disk for storage and backup too...much safer than a partition.:thumbsup:

Cheers....
 
Leo9, thanks a ton friend.You have given me a quantum of hope that I might still be able to recover my lost data.But, I still have some doubts in my mind that I'd like to clear. 1.My data was worth 20 GB and on FAT32 file system.2.Is it possible to recover all data?3.Should I stop using my computer till I recover my lost data?4.Can I recover the data myself at home?5.Please give me a rough idea as to how much those Nehru Place people would charge me. Eagerly awaiting your response.
 
At last, I have been able to recover most of my lost data:yahoo:.However, it took me exactly 12 hours to do so.:wall:.Thank you Leo9 and Superprash for your valuable suggestions.
 
do share, with which utility u were able to recover??
 


Top