Data drive was accidentally partitioned- how do I recover data

[cdavis]

I did a clean install of my primary drive of Win XP. The secondary ( slave 20 gig) drive had my data on it (FAT32).

Somehow the secondary drive was partitioned and Win XP was installed in a 3 gig partition of the drive.

So, I have now have Win XP in an NTFS partition and the 17 gig partition (H) shows unformatted. The unformatted partition shows no data but I know it is there. How do I recover it. I do not want or need the WIN XP on the secondary drive. The 17 gig partition has its own drive letter (H) and when I click on it in Explorer it asks if I want to format the drive.

I have Partition Magic 8, but it is new to me and I am not a hard drive guru. PM8 tells me that the 3 gig partition (G) is primary and that H is a logical drive. (the I have read the instructions and found that I cannot merge a FAT32 and NTFS partition. I can convert one to the other and then merge. But which one should I convert. I will also delete WIN XP (its partition is readable)

Here is the index for converting partitions in PM8

• Procedure for Converting Partitions
• Converting FAT Partitions to FAT32
• Converting FAT Partitions to NTFS
• Converting FAT32 Partitions to FAT
• Converting FAT32 Partitions to NTFS
• Converting FAT/FAT32 Partitions to 4K Aligned
• Converting NTFS Partitions to FAT or FAT32
• Converting Partitions to Logical or Primary


Does anyone know how to save the data?

[Buzioid]

http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html

theres the nifty little partition recovery program.

Download the zip, you get source code and all, but just place the two .exe files in the DOS folder on a floppy disk, and then boot to dos, and run the testdisk program form the floppy disk.
good luck

[Mickwish]

First thing, don't do anything to that drive yet!!

If you want to recover the data, don't play with it anymore.

Most data will be recoverable easily, except where windows was installed (the first 3 gigs), as overwritten data is very hard to recover.

What you need is an app that will recover from partitioning. There are some good ones out there, but only a couple of freebies that will be much good (and they are limited in what they can do). So it sorta depends on how valuable the data is to you, as to whether or not you want to spend money to fix it.

PM will not help recover the data, so don';t use it yet!!

So, first question: are you desperate enough to shell out 50 bucks or so?

Oh, and Welcome to TechIMO!!

Cheers
Mick

[cdavis]

Mickwish,
I am ready. What do I do?

[sechs]

GetDataBack and R-Studio are other excellent tools.