Retrieve files from missing partition

[vegasarian]

I had a 250GB internal drive partitioned to C: = 30GB and D:= remainder. All my video files stored on D:
I had an acronis image of the C: drive and was in the process of restoring to it when almost at the end of the restore it said the image was corrupted.
I now cant get into the BIOS (constantly hitting F2 and F11 on boot up did nothing).
I've installed a new hard drive and added the old one as a slave where it now shows up as D: but only 30GB. This is a 250GB drive.
I'm desperate to retrieve the M2T files from this disc which I know are on the disk somewhere. Am I screwed?

[nic2k4]

No, try Recuva and set it for deep analysis. It will take a long time, but if the files weren't overwritten, it will recover them. Just make sure you save them to the new drive not the 250GB or you will overwrite something else.

[vegasarian]

Brilliant Nic. Got most of them.
I would now like to try and get the capacity of this drive back to its original 250GB (still shows as 30GB) and whenever I try reformatting it only shows as a 30GB drive.
Any thoughts anyone?

[txporter]

This is timely. I am in the midst of recovering from a BIOS "upgrade". It reset my RAID setting in my BIOS to IDE and 2 of my 4 RAID5 drives reset to non-raid. I was able to rebuild the raid using Testdisk. Great little program.

I am now have a problem where the same two drives that were reset to non-raid, now cannot be re-formatted to actually be non-raid now that I have recovered everything from those drive. (I am re-thinking my desire to run with raid and instead plan to run with a standard setup). What I am planning to do is use diskpart.exe (see this thread). Post #4. I haven't tried it yet, but that is what I plan to do to be able to delete the partition and reformat the whole drive.

Jason

[vegasarian]

Gave that a try txporter (diskpart.exe) but, following the instructions from your link, it only actually said that the disc is 30GB but I know its 250GB. Couldn't find options to reset. Be interested to hear how you get on.

[txporter]

Ok, let me back up a bit. Did you try to delete the partition using computer management? I am unable to fix my problem using this, but I don't know that you have the same issue.

If you tried that already and it didn't work, here were some other possible solutions that I found that I intend to try:

Gparted is supposed to be able to delete just about any partition to allow you to start over.

And this thread had a few ideas about fixing write protection problems (which is my problem, not necessarily yours).

Jason

[johns0]

When you install winxp there is an option to delete any hdd partitions,just delete all the partitions and do a quick ntfs format.

[vegasarian]

Installation stalls at "searching IDE"

[Nelson37]

SATA or PATA drive?

Hooked up as secondary drive, Computer Management, delete ALL partitions, no create, reboot with 250 as ONLY hard drive connected, try with Windows install.

Or try Linux and just delete, not create, any partitions.

Double-check drive parameters in BIOS and by drive model.

This is an excellent example of why partitions should be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

You may need to get the manufacturer's diagnostic disk and use that. Sounds like the partition table got seriously screwed up while doing the image restore.

[INFRATOM]

If there is nothing to recover you can fdisk or as mentioned at start of XP just delete all partitions. Its a long time I haven't used partition magic but for your original problem you needed that, just merge all the partitions. In these days 30 gig for OS and programs is not enough. I would say the minimum is the cheapest HD that can be bought which would be 320GB for $50 as a reference. My personal suggestion is RAID zero or +1 for OS and another RAID for data. Some new motherboards have 2 isolated RAID. I have ASUS and it does have it.

[vegasarian]

@ txporter
Computer management didn't show any partitions just D: 'BAD DISK'
I then formatted it and it now shows as 'HEALTHY' but 30GB. Its not write protected.

@ Nelson37
PATA
I'll try "Hooked up as secondary drive, Computer Management, delete ALL partitions, no create, reboot with 250 as ONLY hard drive connected, try with Windows install." and report back.

@ INFRATOM
Yea I've recovered all my files so would now just like to restore the hard drive to its original capacity and use it for file storage. Its not too much of an issue as HD's are so cheap now. So I will quite happily bin this one. Just curious to know why it seems to be locked at 30GB.

[txporter]

I used diskpart.exe to successfully re-format my disks that were giving me write protect errors last night.

When I would go into computer management, I could select the 2 drives that would not re-format and go through the normal format dialogue boxes. At the complete of the quick (or normal) format, it would say that the media was write protected. It would assign the drive letter but list the format as RAW instead of NTFS.

I then launched a CMD window as administrator. I type the following commands:
1. diskpart
2. list volume
3. select volume 2 (and 4 later) - those were my two drives that were listed as RAW in Computer management
4. detail volume (this only gives info on the drives, not really needed. The two drives were listed as Hidden and Read-only)
5. clean (this wiped out all MBR and partition information, more info on all commands found here.)

I then re-booted my computer and re-opened computer management. The two drives listed as needing to be initialized. I initialized them and was able to successfully re-format them to NTFS. All's well.

Hopefully that can work for you although you did say in an earlier post that it did not. Not sure if you used 'clean' or not.

Jason

[INFRATOM]

The restore has screwed the partition table, it was trying to write back the restore to the whole drive maybe in the beginning or when you were restoring you chose the wrong option . I didn't want to suggest risky procedure but you could restore partition table. Partition magic was very good at this, but since you recovered your data time wise does not worth messing unless you want to experiment. You could also reformat it as 30gig and from computer disc management make the rest active and reformat the rest.

[vegasarian]

Nelsons fix worked.
Comp originally froze on 'searching IDE'
After changing the hard drive back to MASTER from SLAVE (jumpers) and following Nelsons suggestions, it then searched for bootable media from CD drive after failing to find anything on IDE. So I inserted XP installation disc and off we went..30GB + 220GB unpartitioned. Deleted the 30 GB partition and now have my original 250GB available.
Many thanks to all who helped me.[/u]