Partition Data Recovery problem. Software recommendations and advice please.

[subucni]

Hi, I've managed to make a completely stupid mistake this evening and could use a little help. I was looking into cloning my Macbook Pro's HDD onto my new SSD as mentioned here, and in the process of trying to do so i've managed to revert my HDD back from having an OSX (16gb) and a Windows (99gb ish) partition, to a single volume OSX partition (115gb) using Boot Camp assistant, deleting the Windows partition in the process. I was supposed to do this to the SSD, in order to reverse something that hadn't worked in my attempt to clone the windows partition onto the SSD, but accidentally did it to the wrong drive like an idiot.

So now i've lost my original Windows partition before i managed to back it up

From the reading i've done tonight on google and the apple forums etc... it seems there is no way to reverse this, but i may be able to recover the files, and just have to re-install windows. I realised the mistake the moment i did it so stopped using the mac straight away in order to prevent data being written over.

Now i could use some help in how to go about trying to retrieve the data, and can anyone recommend some software to aid in doing so. Also, the section of the HDD that was formatted as Windows NTFS is now formatted as a mac partition as the NTFS wasn't simply just deleted. Is this going to cause a problem in getting the data back? If i put the HDD into my external enclosure and use some recovery software while it's connected to my desktop Windows pc, will it have any problems finding the files due to this, or do i have to try recovering them via software on OSX?

If i was working with just an NTFS partition that had been erased, i'd be happier going ahead as described above. However as i'm unsure with the mac journaled formatting thrown into the equation, i don't want to try anything yet incase i make things worse. So i thought i'd be cautious and throw this up to ask for any advice before i continue looking into it tomorrow and trying anything.


Thank you people of Hexus.
Please Help.

[Kumagoro]

I would give photorec a try.

Using the ntfs setting would probably be what you would want to use as the files were originally ntfs. If it doesn't work then try the format its in now. I can't see reading it will affect anything.

To look for files agent ransack is good to search the folders it produces.

You could look into using testdisk which photorec is a part of to undo your partition troubles but I have never tried it out. Have a look into it though and if you did make it work a how to woud be nice.

[subucni]

Thanks for the advice, i've been a bit busy so have just put the HDD to one side for now but i'll try these out when i get chance.

[dream234]

You can almost always recover stuff from HDDs. It's rarely ever gone.

Here's what you should do (in an ideal world).

First, don't use the drive. Don't write anything to it, don't boot off it. Clone the whole drive on a bit-level. Run all recovery operations on the clone, so if you screw it up, you can re-clone. In terms of recovery, I can strongly recommend the Data-Rescue series on Mac (I use Data Rescue II but there might be newer versions available) and Ontrack Easy Data Recovery on Windows. I've had a very, very high success rate using these two (touchwood!).

There are plenty of guides online, but I'd be happy to try and assist if you PM me.

[Sickorz]

I recently used a program called EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional to recover data from a drive that had become badly corrupted. It took a long time to do it but i got all my data back just as it was on the drive in all the right folders and such. I highly recommend it, very easy to use and it works a treat!

[oldboy47]

I have successfully used Photorec/Testdisk and have also tried Easeus - that took 8 days to read a drive of 80Gb!

[subucni]

Hi all, bit of a thread revival here.

First off, thanks for all the help before. Was very useful. Sorting this has been put on the back burner for a while now as is time consuming and wasn't really urgent, but thought it was about time i got it sorted so i had another crack at it yesterday. Now have all of the data recovered i think, except for things i didn't need.

I did have a look with Testdisk and it looked like it found the old partitions and could revert the error, so that looks promising But obviously as Dream234 said best to try it out on a clone first.

Now just to decide whether to bother cloning the HDD onto the SSD and trying out testdisk or just to re-install everything on the HDD instead as i have the data back now anyway. Will probably just re-install to save hassle.



For anyone wondering:
I ran Photorec from within Windows, and recovered 43gb of data, over nearly 450k files, placed randomly into 875 folders and all given names like f46822336.jpg, even with agent ransack for searching documents etc... finding my photos would be a nightmare. So i decided to give EASEUS Data recovery a go. As others have said it took ages to read the drive but eventually gave me a full list of the files with correct names and file structure, so i was able to narrow down to just 27gb of data that may need recovering and just recover that. I hardly needed to recover the 20gb+ of WoW install files Took about 3hours to then recover the 27gb but at least i've got it back.

Thanks again for the help and suggestions.

[Kumagoro]

Thanks for saying how you got on. The random filenames with photorec has always annoyed me so next time i have to do it it i will give easus a go.

I was curious if you could fix it with test disk though. There is never enough time for that sort of thing as you get older is there.

[subucni]

I've not done anything with it yet so i may just try using testdisk on it without bothering to clone it, just to see if it'd work. And then re-install after anyway.

[perryjason]

Hello There,
There is no problem in recovering the data from hard disk even after format . Yes, definitely you can do it by your own. Try the recovery software. But only the condition is you don't have to save anything on your hard disk. You can use the formatted partition data recovery software and only this can help you to recover complete data. Just download the software install it in some other PC and you will be able todownload the complete data using it's feature.

recoverformatteddata.net/partition.html
recoverformatteddata.net/download/recoverformatteddata-win.exe

Regards
Perry

[subucni]

Another big thread revival here.

Thought i'd update this incase anyone was interested or someone stumbles across it while trying to solve the same problem. Thanks to picking up a new graphics card i've finally had the urge to get my new pc build done. This means i needed to get my SSD back out of my Macbook. Since i'd already recovered all of my data (see above) i figured i'd have that shot at fixing it with testdisk before just re-installing everything. I managed to get it to work and have completely restored the old windows operating systems and it's in full working order.

When i looked into Testdisk before it found the lost windows partition but said i couldn't restore it due to there not being enough space on the drive. Not being 100% on how to use testdisk i wasn't sure if it was refering to the drive the data was on (HDD) or if it was going to try recovering it to the current boot drive (SSD). I believed it would only restore the partition in it's initial position by re-writing the partition table and not copy the files to a different drive, but in the interest of delaying the possiblity of overwriting data on the HDD i decide to try the SSD first.

Here are the steps i took.

1. Starting with the SSD still in my laptop i booted into OSX
2. I used Bootcamp Assistant* to delete the windows partition, restoring the OSX partition to the full size of the SSD
3. I followed the details in the article here to nondestructively resize** the OSX partition on the SSD down to 16gb, leaving more than enough room for the lost windows partition.
4. I booted into the 16gb OSX installed testdisk 6.13 from here
5. I connected the HDD via my external enclosure and followed the Testdisk steps from here down to step 9
6. As i half suspected, i hit a brick wall here. Testdisk wouldn't restore the partition to a different drive, so i was going to have to restart on the HDD and finally risk overwriting the data if it doesn't work (obviously not really a risk to me now as i'd already recovered the data)
7. Next i took out the SSD and put the HDD back into the macbook. A guide can be found here
8. With the HDD back in place i redid steps 1-4 above
9. I ran Testdisk again, this time when i got to step 9 everything was fine so i went to [write] in the menu and saved the partition structure.
10. I booted back into OSX and all partitions where showing correctly, but i could not boot into the windows partition. I did also semi expected this from previous research and had looked into a solution.
11. In order to try and repair the boot record i downloaded the rEFIt installer package from within OSX and installed it
12. With rEFIt installed i rebooted the Macbook, which loaded into the program, from here i booted into Windows, which worked fine.
13. Finally i rebooted back into OSX and used Startup Disk under System preferences to set the Windows partition as the default OS to boot at start up***
14. Everything was completely restored and back to exactly as i had it before making my stupid mistake in the first place. All that was left was to do was catch up on the updates that it was missing.

*As i'm using OSX Tiger 10.4.11 I'm using a copy of Bootcamp beta i had to fudge with the system date in order to get bootcamp assistant to run.
** From OSX 10.5 and up this can be done non destructively from within OSX using Disk Utility, but again as i'm using 10.4.11 i had to follow the guide linked.
*** I did try this step before installing rEFIt too but it did not work, so rEFIt was needed.

Sorry for the lengthy post but hopefully someone will find it useful.

Cheers again to all that helped me get it fixed.
Bres.

[Kumagoro]

Thanks for the follow up, if I come across a similar problem hopefully I will be able to find this thread again.