Firstly, can anyone explain why Windows 2000 would, when told to format an existing 30gb partition on a 320gb SATA II drive with 2 other partitions on it, the setup delete all the partitions and create a 127gb system partition? Anyone? It gave me no warning of this...and I had to boot to a frankenstien install on another disk to figure this out...
Which brings me to my second question. Short of professional data recovery services, are there any programs capable of retrieving deleted but not overwritten data/partitions? I just want names of programs, price is a non-issue. At this rate I would pay a good deal.
Help is vastly appreciated.
Were you doing this during a 2K installation? Win2K needs Service Pack 3 to support LBA for drives larger than 137GB, or else it has problems recognizing partitions that start after the 137th GB.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305098/EN-US/
Here's a recovery program I found. Got good ratings from ZDnet.
http://www.partition-recovery.com/
>any programs capable of retrieving deleted but not overwritten data/partitions?
>>2
I know that...but I only told it to format a partition that was 30gigs...it should work, since all it's formatting a partition that was under the required size...
Previously it had worked, except that the drive I was using was failing, so it never finished formatting. >_>
Anyway, thanks for the link to data recov stuff, I'll look into it. ^__^
>>4
The partition size is irrelevant, it's the "starting after the 137th GB" that matters.
>>4 Obviously the installer b0rked at the partition table, and thus thought it safer to blast it away and start afresh.
Hence you've lost your partition.
I had the same problem with Windows NT 4.0 Workstation on a 40GB HDD, when I first got my current desktop. I'd install WinNT, Linux, all my data... etc... something in WinNT would screw up, and I'd loose the lot. The rescue disk was useless because it had the same limitation as unpatched WinNT 4.0.
I ended up running Linux mostly, because I got fed up of arguing with Windows NT. I later upgraded NT 4.0 to Windows 2000, which works fine on the machine ... but naturally, I use the box under Linux 99% of the time.