Lost partition

[rpraveen6r]

Hello, All

I had installed win 7 in my system. After installation, I have found that one of my partition is missing. I checked in disk management, there it was found that the space is unpartitioned disk. How can i recover the data in that also, can i retrieve the drive. Pls help there is lot of imp data in it.

Thanking you.

 

[boyans]

Hi,

1. Can you post a map of your disk and give short info on partition contents.
2. What OS was running before? Did you instal Win 7 over it?
3. Have you done any formating before/after install of Win 7?
4. Any partition resizing ?

 

[rpraveen6r]

1.I was running win vista before that.
2.I haven't done any formatting, but i re sized the drive. earlier the drive was having four partition. I have increased the c partition and formatted the c drive only.
3. Is there any thing that, win 7 is accepting only 4 partition. if so then how do we create more partition. With two or more drives.

 

[boyans]

There is a limit of 4 primary partitions on a physical disk.
But you can have say 3 primary + 1 extended with many logical partitions on one physical disk.

Resizing (growing) of "c:" has involved shrinking of the partition next to it.
Moving the starting point of a partition usually means destroying of the file system on that partition.

I don't think that you can recover the files on the "unpartitioned disk space".

(Maybe there are companies/people which could recover some files from this "unpartitioned disk space" as it was not formated but this not an easy and cheap task!)

 

[1Bowtie]

If you extended C:/ and formated the whole of C then you lost whatever data was there. If you could give us a picture of disk mgmt it would make alot more sense of what we're talking about.

 

[gregrocker]

Doing an install or repair without backing up your files is reckless.

You can try recovering the partition using free Partition Wizard bootable CD "Recover Partition Wizard" Free Download Magic Partition Manager Software - Partition Wizard Online

If this fails you can try to recover data using Recuva: Recuva - Features

 

[rpraveen6r]

Ok I understood the foolishness of my activity and I am paying a lot for that. Pls advice me how can we create more drives (more than 4 patition) in one disk. Also about a dual boot system with one boot of Win 7.

 

[gregrocker]

Disk Management will create Primary partitions for the first three created.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2674-partition-volume-create-new.html

For your fourth partition, Disk Management will create Logical, which can then be subdivided into as many sub-partitions as there are letters. Logicals are for data, not an OS.

At any time before the fourth partition is created, you can create a Logical partition using free Partition Wizard bootable CD.

 

[debugged]

Logicals are for data, not an OS.

Of course if you only have one partition, it has to be primary. Otherwise, I have never noticed any differences in experience or performance between systems on logical or primary partitions. Your boot files have to be on an active primary partition, either the little 100MB one reserved for that purpose, or on one system partition if you choose to do away with the "system reserve". The subsequent systems can be logical or primary, doesn't seem to matter.

 

[gregrocker]

We see so many cases of the System boot files being derailed to a primary data partition that it's easier to advise Logical for data partitions to avoid problems during partitioning, installs or repair operations.