Missing partition

[Evolutionman]

Hey,


I had a version of windows 7 installed on my HDD as dualboot on my D:
My HDD has 3 partitions (c:113gb, d:90gb, e:20). This worked fine.
I decided that I liked Windows 7 so I wanted to re-install it on a permanent basis so I went through the installation, formatted C: ONLY and installed windows 7 as a fresh copy. During installation, I noticed that c: & d: showed up correctly but e: was not showing. Instead, there was a 20gb unallocated space. I thought i'd ignore this as I have a lot of files on e: and I hoped that when I finished installing windows 7 on C: then E: would show up correctly.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. I cannot see E: in my computer. When I go to disk management, I can see the 20gb space but no drive letter has been assigned to it. Furthermore, when I right-click on the space, I cannot do any task (i.e. assign drive letter) except delete. Everything else is disabled.
This looks like Windows 7 has decided to delete my drive without my permission. I have done absolutely nothing to the partition during or after installation yet i can't get it working.
I tried some recovery programs to gain acces to my data, but the progroms only show my data, but wont recover it till I buy the actual program.

So my question is:
Can I recover my data without formatting the disk?

 

[Evolutionman]

pff, after some time searching I found testdisk, and now I got all my data back