Partition Find and Mount

[Orbital Shark]

Recently a friend asked me to look into why his PC was shorting out - turns out his power supply wasn't powerfull enough but that's another story

It turns out that one time when it cut out, his external 320GB hard disk crapped out too and was showing 2.5GB of available data and a 295GB unallocated partition.....Oh dear, there was sooo much data on that disk.

I started searching for partition recovery software and came accross a little (1.6MB) app call Partition Find and Mount so thought I'd give it a try. OMG!! It scans the affected drive then allows you to Mount the deleted partition to a new drive letter. This allows you to access the deleted partition so you can copy anything you may need over to a new drive. You can then unmount, close the software and delete the partitions and reformat the drive, good as new

Painless Partition Recovery

Partition Find & Mount implements a new concept of deleted or lost partition recovery. It works in the most convenient way possible — by locating and mounting partitions into the system, thus making those lost partitions available to you like any generic disk volume. Partition Find & Mount will also work in case any Boot Record (including the Master Boot Record) is missing, damaged or overwritten.




Partition Find & Mount is:

• Easy to use. You do not need special knowledge to use the software.
• Safe to your data. There is no possible way you could get things worse.
• Free for personal use. Use it as much as you like.

Lost important data? Give it a try. Partition Find & Mount is free for personal use!

Source Here

And....It works on Windows 7 too

 

[chuckr]

Good post OS...

Thanks!

(When I saw "Source Here", I thought it was the 'source-code' for the freebie!)


Wonder whatever happened to that " FUJITSU MPF3102AT hard drive" that he was going to demo ?

(In a good mood tonight...)

 

[Kari]

Was looking a tool to retrieve mysteriously disappeared system recovery partition from an old HP Pavilion laptop which I want to restore to factory settings. Found it using the tool of this tip. Thanks, mate. Now looking for some quality posts around here to be able to rep you, currently your rep button tells "You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Orbital Shark again."

Kari

 

[Sassa]

Nice post...
Thanks.
+rep

 

[Orbital Shark]

Was looking a tool to retrieve mysteriously disappeared system recovery partition from an old HP Pavilion laptop which I want to restore to factory settings. Found it using the tool of this tip. Thanks, mate. Now looking for some quality posts around here to be able to rep you, currently your rep button tells "You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Orbital Shark again."

Kari

That's not problem mate, glad it worked for you too

Nice post...
Thanks.
+rep

You're welcome & thanks

 

[Sir Glen]

This won't work for me, it says that it uses a driver that is not digitally signed, is this because I'm using 7 x64? How can I solve this problem? I lost a 250GB data partition. All the data is still there but I can't get to it, and other software I've seen that can access it costs $100+

 

[Orbital Shark]

Hi Sir Glen welcome to the forums.

I don't use 64bit but if you boot up using the F8 key (just after the POST screen) 1 of the options is regarding Disabling Driver Signing. Try that option then install the software.

Hope it helps


OS

 

[Sir Glen]

Thank you very much OS, that worked. I wasn't aware of the F8 option previously, it's nice to know it's there.

 

[Orbital Shark]

You're welcome

 

[Polda18]

Hello, and sorry for necroposting. If that bothers you, I'll make a new thread upon request. But it is specific to this particular piece of software. Apparently, I am the only one, that this thing happened to, or it happened to so little people that I can't find any useful informations regarding this issue.

I tried this software out yesterday. At first, I tried thorough scan, which was quite long (it is a 1TB external drive), but in the end it found a deleted partition I needed. Tried to mount, program crashed (not responding). I thought that was it, mounting was unsuccessful and it's a useless piece of crap. So I uninstalled it, and started doing something else. I didn't realise. I didn't notice, until it was time to shut down the PC and go to sleep, that there was a new volume mounted to the system. It had files in it, and it was labeled with the drive letter I assigned to the deleted partition that has been found. Turns out it did actually work. I quickly looked through it, everything worked as it should, I could navigate around, even open files, didn't try copying files tho, which is what I wanted to try today. So I installed the program back quickly, shut down the PC and disconnected the drive. Big mistake. Apparently, when I shut down the PC before unplugging the disk (or maybe it didn't have an effect on that), system still thinks the partition is connected, yet even after reconnecting the disk, I cannot navigate the file system, I cannot open files. System thinks the partition is mounted, even the program thinks it's mounted, but system tells me the file system is corrupted, and program cannout unmount the partition, it shows me this error:


This is what the program tells me:


How can I unmount a ghost volume? I figured out I need to unmount it, find it again, and then mount newly found partition before I could proceed.

- - - Updated - - -

Hello, and sorry for necroposting. If that bothers you, I'll make a new thread upon request. But it is specific to this particular piece of software. Apparently, I am the only one, that this thing happened to, or it happened to so little people that I can't find any useful informations regarding this issue...

So, here's the thing. I investigated registry to search for "Partition Find and Mount", that exact string didn't yield anything, but "Find and Mount" did, several registry keys. One of them was labeled with "slicedisk", and pointed out to a file "slicedisk_x64.sys", which resides in PFM install directory. I figured out that file wouldn't be too wise to delete, but I tried to delete the registry key that pointer was in, and rebooted Windows. That helped actually, phantom drive was no more. So I tried to find and mount that deleted partition again with PFM and voilà, it did work again. This time, I let the PC take its time to open the Explorer with the partition for me, and it didn't crash. Perfect. Now did it really work?So first I tried to navigate around. Check. Next time, I tried to open various files. Check. Tried to copy a small file from it. Check. Then I copied all contents from a single folder. Check. Then I tried to mount a virtual CD image from the partition, plays without any issue. Check. Then, the moment of truth. Does the copied file work? Does the virtual CD mount from my copied files? Yes, it does. So that's another, and final check. So did it really work? I think so. This is what I'm going to stick with, and this is what I'm going to use to copy the entire contents of the deleted partition to another external disk.

Thanks anyway, even I actually figured this out myself. Let's keep this in for further readers who might come across similar issue.