Windows 7: Mystery Partition - Accidentally Put Data on System Partition??

Hello, I was really hoping somebody could help us. It's a bit of a strange situation we're in but I'll try to keep the facts as concise as possible.

Computer running Windows 7 Ultimate x64, 1TB Hard Drive.



Yesterday my boyfriend discovered an 'extra' partition on his computer. He'd never seen it before and was very much enthused at having the extra space to store files etc, but sadly didn't question what, how or why this showed up randomly.

Skip to today... he went to access some of the files he put on the mystery drive, but discovered the whole thing wasn't there anymore. Cue a lot of swearing, trying to figure out what happened. We've collectively been trying to find out what might have happened for the entire day and haven't got too far.

The only idea I've struck upon is that maybe for some reason the System Reserved partition became visible and/or active for a short period of time - eg. enough time for him to start loading files into that area, but then hidden itself again? Is this even a possible or plausible idea?

If this is the case, how the heck do we get the partition to show up again and access the 'lost' data... the partition obviously isn't showing up anymore and for the life of us, we can't get it to show up using partition recovery tools either >_<

Sorry for sounding totally 'noobish' - any thoughts, suggestions or ideas would be really great.

~ BitBat

Post a screenshot of the disk management Windows, using built in Snipping Tool.

How to Post a Screenshot in Seven Forums - Windows 7 Forums

Thanks for answering eldinv. Ok, I will do that... I'm currently posting from my laptop so will have fire up 'the tank' to get that for you. Please bare with me in the mean time

~ BitBat

Hello BitBat Welcome to the Seven Forums!

It sounds like he likely copied files over to the 100mb system reserved partition. Here's a look at you would expect to see on that when booted from a live cd. Note the screenshot was made while booted in a Linux distro at the time in order to view the default files and folders present on that.

Hello BitBat, welcome to Seven Forums!





To access the "System Reserved" partition it may be as simple as assigning the partition a "Drive Letter" in disk management; if you do so be sure to remove the letter again after the files that got moved there are retrieved and DON'T move anything else from that partition.

   Information

In the Windows start menu right click computer and click manage, in the left pane of the "Computer Management" window that opens click disk management.

click to enlarge

Once you go to assign a new drive letter you will seee part of the Add New Volume wizard. From there one letter or another will remain assigned to it. That will then be visible at all times being mounted as a logical drive.

But once the letter is removed as per "Bare Foot Kid" comment, all associations will be removed (logical or otherwise) - Is this correct?

Yes, if the letter is removed it'll remain a "Primary" partition though.