Please Help Me Recover From Fdisk

[Shadal]

I'm about to cry...
I accidentally fdisked my external usb NTFS 500GB drive and repartitioned it. It contains everything I've collected over the past 15 years...

I've tried running Active Partition Recovery within windows until the computer froze after 3 days and only at 46% scanned. Last night I tried running DiskPatch from within dos (from Hiren BootCD). It ran the scan pretty quickly compared to Active Partition, but it did not find any files or the correct partition.

Please help suggest something that will recover my drive :(

[Midknyte]

Try this link off of Best of Data Storage (http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?t=162275)

Did Your Hard Drive Die? & How to get your data back (http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=154817)

Your external drive should be for BACKUPS, not the only copy of your data.

[Sterling_Aug]

Or you should have two external drives (one for data and one for backups).

Having only one copy of important data is (putting it bluntly) STUPID!!!

I would use GetDataBackNTFS.

[Shadal]

This was my backup drive which I left plugged in while formatting and reinstalling windows. My plan was to copy the files back from the backup drive to the computer after the reformat, but accidentally fdisked Disk1 when Disk0 for some reason didn't show up in fdisk.

I've got GetDataBack running now, I tried it before on Vista but couldn't get it to list any drives. XP seems to do the trick. So far it says it's found 172,000+ files... boy I hope so!

[Midknyte]

Why are you using fdisk at all? The XP setup can partition and format the drive for you.

[Shadal]

I was trying to get Vista to install, but for some reason it can't see my 250GB Maxtor hard drive... I've fdisked, formatted, low level formatted, vista doesn't like it... I dono.. Win98, XP, 2003 all install perfectly fine. All tests on the drive have come back as passed..

[Sterling_Aug]

Did you install the Vista drivers? Is it a SATA hard drive or IDE?

[Shadal]

no, it's IDE...
Strangely, if the drive is partitioned but unformatted, vista's install runs extremely slow, but when I finally get to the formatting screen it does show the drive, however it won't successfully format it, it doesn't give an error. The next step, copying files, just sits at 0% until the error "Unable to reinitialize deployment engine" pops up and I can't go any further.
If the hard drive is formatted, ntfs, vista install runs a bit quicker, but cannot see the hard drive.
I can successfully install vista on my Maxtor 80GB just not this 250GB. *shrugs*

I spent 5 days trying every jumper configuration, every boot source, every bios setting (raid configuration, etc), running tests, anything I could think of from my years of experience with hardware, never have I encountered anything like this...


BTW, update on my recovery situation:
GetDataBack has found 371GB of data, I was lucky enough to have had it find everything! I'm currently in the process of copying these recovered files to another hard drive.

Thanks for the suggested links!

*phew*
-Shadal