PARTITION EMERGENCY

ok so i as having issues with my windows xp install, i tried to do a system repair and it would freeze about 20 minuites from completion so i decided im going to format and reinstall BUT first i had to move all of my saved data onto another parititon. ok so i booted into windows 2k opened up partition magic and told it to resize my xp partition and make a new partition with the free space. and BAM it froze now it aswell as disk managment tell me that the partition is still 168GB but is unformated. is there any way i can recover this?

Use a program called Get Data Back NTFS (or FAT32 if you for some reason had XP on FAT32 filetype)

id like to start off with the situation has gone from bad to criticaly ****ty. i downloaded diy data recovery which is supposed to work as a live cd dos based app and the disk i guess i didnt create it correctly. and now since the xp partition is toast i dont have a boot loader. im currently using a knoppix live cd i quite luckily happend to have sitting around. ok so i did download get data back ntfs before all this BUT it told me not to run it on the drive im planing to repair and i dont happen to have a spare hard drive siting around.... this isnt good.

STOP USING THE HARDDRIVE NOW!

MaximumPC did a How-To article on data recovery. They found only one utility out of several which did the job well. That utility was, of course, GetDataBack for NTFS. They also noted that the trial version did not work as well as the registered version.

Full article is here: http://maximumpc.com/2006/02/how_to_recover.html

If the data is truly important I suggest you get GetDataBack for NTFS (registered version; $100) and try to recover that way. You need to get another HDD to run the recovery tools from. You'll take your new HDD, install the recovery tools on it and run it on the affected drive (installed as secondary)

OK so i think i got it, i downloaded barts PE builder and am extracting a win XP install right now, i got the get data back for NTFS plugin and added it(had to burn the image twice because i didnt see the plugins button the first time) with any luck i think im gona have what i need shortly. ill let you guys know if it works. i didnt know not to use the HDD at first and was using my win 2k off the hdd for a bit before i rebooted and tried for the first boot disk. and have since then ben on knoppix so the disk is relativly untouched. most importantly the partition i want to save i havnt messed with at all.