Windows 7 - Recovery Software

I made a major mistake and used Paragon's Partition Manager to attempt to resize the partition that contained ~400GBs of video files. I wanted to add space from partitions that I had removed located before the video partition. It increased the size of the partition exactly as instructed, but it appears to have erased the contents and left the partition marked as free space.

I have O&O's UnErase, but haven't used it before. Since it didn't see the free space, I used Disk Management to make a partition out of it, but did not format it, because I thought that would make recovery more difficult. UnErase now sees the partition, but complains that there is no file system, and doesn't appear as though it will work unless I do format it.

I'm wondering if there is some recovery program that wouldn't require the partition to be formatted to work?

O&O's unerase is for when you accidentally delete a file, not erase an entire partition. I would try something like their diskrecovery6.

Thanks, I'm in the process of running it now. I'm not sure how well it will work, because even though I pointed it at only the old partition area of the drive, it says that the size is equal to the entire drive, not just that partition. It appears that it will take ~2.5 hours to finish, and even then it won't actually recover anything, because it is just the trial version, and I don't want to pay $100 for it. Isn't there a free or cheaper program available that will do the job?

Several of my acquaintances have recommended Partition Find and Mount:

Partition Find and Mount — free partition recovery software

i checked that link, but it didn't include Windows 7 or x64 in the list of supported OSs.

LiquidSnak,

Not too surprisingly, what initially appeared would take 2.5 hours, took all day to finish the recovery scan, but it appears to have found all of the video files, which is what I wanted to confirm before shelling out any cash on this or any other program. Now I have to decide whether to pay O&O or keep looking. It depends on which is strongest, my tightness or lazyness.

lol, a battle for the ages. Keep in mind that sending out a drive costs $400+ for data recovery. Keep looking, I am not sure what else is out there, but $100 bucks to be able to recover any data that gets destroyed on a working drive by format or partition for the rest of (insert long time here) is invaluable.

It hurt, but I bit the bullet and registered the program. It appears to have worked perfectly and recovered 1437 video files, so the pain is easing rapidly. Of course, I won't really know that all of the files were recovered properly, until I try to play each of them, and that will take quite some time. Still, I feel fairly confident that all is well.

I'm glad it worked out well for you so far