HowTo Recover Deleted Dynamic NTFS Partition on WinXP

[nathanhawk]

A little history... (or you could just skip to my question at the end)
Somehow I ended up with a 100GB drive partitioned as follows:

C:5GB NTFS System | 19GB Unalloc | 19GB NTFS | 49+ Unalloc

My uneducated intention was to leave the 19GB unallocated in case I needed to extend my system partition.
Unfortunately, it wasn't until I started receiving the "C: Drive Full messages" when I learned that my brilliant plan was not going to work because I could not resize the system partition (Anyone know of workaround for this?).
This being the case, I decided to create a SWAP partition in order to free up close to 1GB on the C: drive.

I didn't have any "magic" tools so I tried to solve my problems with WinXP's Disk Management Snap In (yeah right!).

Problem #2: you can only have 4 partitions on a drive. Either 4 primary OR 3 primary + 1 extended.
This means that if I create my 1-1.5GB SWAP partition with my given config I will be left with at least 17GB of unusable disk space. I'll try to picture this for you:

C:5GB NTFS System Primary | SWAP:1GB NTFS Primary | 18GB UNUSABLE | DATA:19GB NTFS Primary | 49+ NTFS Extended

So now I find out that I can expand my non-system partitions if I convert my disk from basic to dynamic. I've got XP PRO, I can do that. Conversion successful. So now my goal is to expand the 19GB partition. So I decided to test it by expanding it 1GB.

C:5GB NTFS System | SWAP:1GB NTFS | 1GB NTFS | 17GB Unalloc | DATA:19GB NTFS Primary | 49+ Unalloc

I was so excited to see that I could now fill in the 18GB gap that I decided I would delete the newly created 1GB test partition and then expand the 19GB partition by 18GB to fill the gap. So I deleted the 1GB partition and my beautiful 19GB data containing partition disappeared along with it.
OOPS! The second I did this out of reflex I hit CTRL+Z... nope, no undo in this utility. This is what happens when you do disk management at 3am in the morning! You may laugh, but I bet I'm not the first to be bit by this. So basically the warning is that be careful when dealing with dynamic partitions because they most likely will not be contiguous and you may delete more than you think you are deleting. (There may have been a warning, but my eyes were pretty glazed).

OK, so that was a lot of history, but now you know that there was a lot of {wasted} thought put into my ultimate blunder!

Now for my question. Anyone know of a good FREEWARE program that I can use to simply recover an accidentally deleted NTFS partition on a dynamic drive on WinXP Pro?
I also welcome comments on what I should have done and should do?
Thanks.

[DVNT1]

maybe this can help... http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=245725


other slightly related links http://www.labmice.net/Windows2000/d...skrecovery.htm


and a few more http://www.labmice.net/Windows2000/d...namic_disk.htm

[PresterJohn]

some thoughts on how you could have resized C: w/o losing data...

obviously, the easiest way would have been to use a partitioning program like partition magic to non-destructively resize c:
there are some free partition managers as well.

another option if is if you have a disk imaging utility like ghost would be to create a fat32 volume in the 49gb+ space, boot w/a win98 disk, ghost the c: partition to the fat32 partition, delete C: and then restore & resize c: using the image file.

btw, i hope you do understand now why deleting the 1gb expanded portion wiped out the 19gb one...