Windows 7: Help recover deleted volume

I accidentally deleted my portable hard drive volume when messing around with Disk Management on Windows 7. The hard drive is formatted using FAT32 and is about 120GB. Is there any way to recover it? I have all media and some important documents in there. Any help would be really appreciated.

Thank you.

Hi,

You can use the undelete option in a 3rd party partition manager. As long as you haven't attempted to change that partition in any way other than delete it, should work fine.

If you have a partition Manager - see if it has that option. Post back and let me know.

SIW2

The partition is not changed I believe. It wasn't really a partition, it was more of the whole volume on the hard drive. >.> I created a new volume on it but didn't format it or anything, so the volume is currently raw. Should I deleted this volume before I run a third party manager?

I fond out MS has a tool called Dmdiag.exe to do this, however I don't know if it's safe to run it on Windows 7. Does anyone know any good ones out there that have a high probability of recovering my deleted volume? Thanks.

Hi Goldenboy,

Not sure what effect having created a new volume would have - normally you would undelete as the first operation after accidental deletion.

If the new volume was identical in size and not formatted, it may still work.

I believe dmdiag.exe only gives information about the drive, it is not a partition manager itself - no idea if it would even do that on 7 as it from 2000/xp days, as far as I know. I have never used it so can't say for sure.

I use the Paragon partition Manager - which only undeletes unallocated space, obviously.

You would need to open the partition manager and right click the volume to see if it offers undelete as an option , if not, you may need to delete it again.

May be able to help you with something that will do the job - are you using 32bit, or 64bit?

SIW2

Ok I'll try something better like Partition Manager. I'm currently running 32bit. I'll let you know what happens. Thank you for the help.

Hello goldenboy, welcome to Windows 7 Forums!


Were I you, I'd wait for SIW2's response regarding this; he knows disk options and software.







Later Ted

Oops I missed that part. I'll wait for his advice. :P

http://www.glarysoft.com/gu.html

http://www.recuva.com/download

The problem may be you have rewritten the partition table by creating a new partition - even tho. you have not formatted it.

If you rt click it and don't get the Undelete option , you will need to delete it again , then Undelete.

It may only only reconstruct the last partition you just created - if that is the case , then nothing will be able to do it. Worth a try.

Otherwise there is something else you could try. Unless you are going to send it to a specialist recovery firm , you could remake the partition , do a quick format and see what these two can recover after a quick format - can't guarantee what you will get back tho.

Hope it helps

SIW2

Woot! The FATty is finally restored. MS has a pretty good guide on doing this. I had to use Dmdiag.exe to reverse what I had done by calling a reserved sector on my hard drive. The only problem was that Dmdiag.exe doesn't work on Windows 7 so I had to rely on machine running XP. Problem took less than 5 mins to solve.

SIW2 I tried the program you linked me to via pm. It didn't seem to want to run on Windows 7 so I tried it on a machine running XP. The only problem was that it would take 3+ hours to go through every sector on the hard drive, time I couldn't afford on that machine running XP.

Thanks for all the support though. I appreciate it.

Hi goldenboy,

Didn't realise you could link to an Xp machine.

Dmdiag.exe must be pretty capable, but sadly seems to only run on legacy systems.

Glad you got it sorted out.

SIW2