recover data from unallocated space

[rdn]

Hi,

I recently reinstalled xp. to do this it formatted the c-drive. after it was done installing i noticed my e-drive was missing. in the administrative tools i saw this was unallocated space.
there was (is?) still loads of data on this drive i need. I tried loads of recover tools but none of them seem to have options to recover data from unallocated space.
I think this the person in this thread had the same kind of problem as i have now: 200g Maxtor suddenly unallocated,

I did try recovermyfiles, but like i said, it doesnt seem to let me select unallocated space.

the drive is (or was anyway) partioned into the following:
C-Drive approx 40gb
D-Drive approx 100gb
E-Drive approx 100gb (now unallocated)

any help would be gladly appreciated!

[GDH]

Unallocated space just means that as far as windows is concerned there are no files in the disk.

For example, if you have a 100gb drive with 10gb of files, then you have 90gb of "unallocated space".

In order to find the files on this drive you need to try the following:

1. With Recover My Files run a "Fast Format Recover" of the "physical drive" (you will see the "physical drives" listed in the second wizard window. Your booting drive is physical drive 0, and any subsequent drives are 1, 2, 3 etc). This search should take less than 20 mintues so try this first.

if this does not work....

2. Run a "Complete Format Recover" of the physical drive for the default selected file types.

if this does not work.....

3. Try a "Complete File Search" of the physical drive for selected file types.

You should get all your data back.

[rdn]

I tried all three options. It finds some files but not the ones i'm after. many of the files it does find are corrupt though (e.g. mp3s starting at some random point and jumping to another track halfway through). any ideas?

thanks

[GDH]

Is it correct to say that you only have one physical drive in your comptuer which has been partition into 3 drives, C:, D: and E:?

Does your E: drive still show as a drive letter? If so, have you tried running the searches on the E: drive.

[rdn]

I have 2x 250GB SATA drives.

Drive 1:
C -approx 50gb
D- approx 100gb
E- approx 100gb

Drive 2:
F- approx 125gb
G- approx 125gb

Now it's the E-Drive on drive 1 that's giving all the problems. It did not show up in explorer, the administration tools said it had 100gb of unpartitioned space on that drive.

As I couldnt choose that non existing drive in Recovermyfiles, I finally made it into a partition but left it unformatted. Now that recovermyfiles actually sees it, I tried all the options on it. It didn't find the data i was after, and any data it did find was largely corrupted.

I also noticed 2 days ago that the files on the G drive are all corrupt. E.g. mp3s open, but dont play. text files are empty.

If there's a way to rescue the data from the G-Drive that would be great, but I'd rather get the data of the E-Drive. The files I'm after are mainly .wav, .mp3, .rns and .rfl files.

thanks.

[rdn]

anyone?

sorry for the bump..

[GDH]

Do you know if the problem drive was formatted NTFS or FAT32.

[rdn]

Originally Posted by GDH

Do you know if the problem drive was formatted NTFS or FAT32.

both drives are NTFS

[rdn]

The weirdest thing ever happened now..

I finally gave up on recovering the data and moved on. I formatted every drive and reinstalled windows. Once installed, I noticed that all the files which use to be on the E-Drive were back, after formatting! How? No idea.. I'm just glad I've got them!

Anyone care to explain that?

[Buratino]

It happend to have almost the same problem as you had. I needed to reinstall windows on the first hard drive and after installing it show me the second hard drive as unallocated space. I have some important data to recover from there. I used Recover My files but didnt see any files to recover. Anyidea?
Bura