Undeleteing a partition

[Magictoaster_v2]

Right so I forgot to put in my SATA disk when installing windows and thought that my external drive was my internal drive and accedentily wrote over the partition table.

There is a massive amount of data on this drive that I REALLY REALLY want back.

Partition Magic could not undelete the partition and every time I tryed to manually write my own partition table windows would recognize the right size but would ask if I wanted to format it or not (of corse i said no)

PLease please help, How do I get windows to recognize that this is a 120gb ntfs drive with all my files on it?

Can I do it for free?

Tools I have:
Ultimate boot CD
partition magic 8
knoppix live cd

Thanks in advance
The Toaster

 

[Magictoaster_v2]

Well since no one here seemed to want to help me out I did my own research and found a few things out. If you happen to delete a partition don't do anything at all to it. This includes creating a new partition even if it is the same size as the last one.

Turns out NTFS drives store a back up partion table at the end of the drive and there are many free ware programs out that will find this back up and restore it automatically. If these programs can't find it you can use a program called probedisk that comes with any coppy of windows xp. It is located on the cd, it is a sector editor, at with it you can manually trach down your back up PT and restore yourself.

If you are like me and made the mistake of deleting and recreating the partion or the back up is either not present or damaged then I recomened you use GetDataBack for NTFS. This is the only program that I found that was able to find everything that I wanted back. It even found stuff from a year back that had/should have been deleted via a FULL format.

So long story short I managed to get my data back and now know what to do if this happens again.

Hope some one finds this post usefull. Feel free to PM if you have a similar problem because I think by now I have read everything ever published on the internet about the topic

The Toaster

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

nice to know.

but i didnt know MS set up could install windows on an external drive - i guess if your bios supports booting from USB devices it can...

i had a bad disk issue and the program i used was R-Tools Data Recovery.

 

[rseven]

I had no idea you could do such a thing short of an FBI lab. I figured your data was lost forever. Nice to know that there is a way of fixing a major mess up such as that one. Good work!