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Windows 7 Killed My Partition
Everything was fine. I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 on my C: partition a couple days ago, while keeping important data (family photos, videos, etc.) on my D: partition, and everyting went off without a hitch. For the last couple of days I've had no problems. Then this afternoon, I shut down the computer and start it up again an hour later and the D: partition has totally disappeared to be replaced with "free space." The partition had been totally obliterated without warning or explanation - it's just gone. I made the mistake of going into the Disk Manager and reassigning the letter to the partition in the hopes that would fix the problem but now Windows wants to reformat the drive (which I have not allowed since I want to recover the data some how). I've been using and upgrading Windows since the Windows 95 days and I have NEVER, EVER seen this happen. I tried using Partition Wizard as it advertised a partition recovery tool but have not had success with it and I'm now thinking I'm going to have to drop a some money into a more robust data recovery option.
If anyone has any ideas I would sure appreciate it. I'm not really expecting any good news and am really posting this as a warning and to document that there is something very strange going on with this Windows 7 OS. I have never seen a version a Windows nuke a partition without warning, notice, or explanation while giving no recourse other than to turn to third party vendors who exist for these very reasons. Yea of course I had 99% of the data backed up on an external hard drive (thank god I didn't trust Microsoft) but that's not the point.
A quick google search shows I'm not the only one who has experienced this - I expected better by now.
Last edited by Iwa Washi; 31 Jan 2010 at 04:08.