Data retrieval?

[verbatim]

Ok heres what I've done. I have a 60 gig hard drive. It had 4 partitions. I repartitioned it to 3 partitions (10,15 and 34gig). I have reformted the two smaller partitio but the third is yet to be reformated, even though it is partitioned off.

I've lost some files I need back and want to recover them.
I've heard this is posible and in these forums one guy said to use this for another guys prob. http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecovery/

My questions are.

1 is it possible to retrieve data from repartitions?

2 If it is do I format the large partition first or can it be left as is?

I havent written over the data by reformating so I think it may be possible but plz help guys.

Ta

[josi]

Yes, it is still possible to retrieve data from deleted or reformatted partition, but the percentage of the recoverable files depends from the file system type on the old partition, the best is NTFS, then FAT32 and FAT. Anyway, if you want to recover some data, better leave everything as is and run the recovery utility first.

[JigPu]

Just making sure here... You had 4 partitions, repartitioned to 3, formatted the first 2, but your data was on one of the original 4?

It's possible to get your data back. As long as you haven't written to the drive since you lost it, there should be a descent chance of recovery. Also, the less fragmented the partition was before you repartitoned, the faster and more likely a file recovery program will find files. That and the file system (like josi said) will have an impact.

As long as it can reconstruct the FAT (or whatever NTFS uses), then your gold. Cross your fingers, and don't let ANYTHING write to that drive!

JigPu

[verbatim]

i have installed 2 versions of windows to the smaller drives but hopefully thats not the important part

[Molybdym]

I actually have this same question on the post below this one. So I'll stick to this one. Same premise(sp?), drive had Win98, now when looking in XPPro, it says unallocated, so something happened to the DOS partition?