Windows 7 Killed My Partition

[Iwa Washi]

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.

 

[steve-pressman]

Try using this I have had good experience with it

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download


Steve

 

[WindowsStar]

I have not seen this before with Windows 7 and I have over 100 Windows 7 installs under my belt. Many many times I have installed clean on C: with a D: drive and valid data. With that said I have seen partitions disappear because part of the partition table goes bad on the drive. Any part of a hard drive can have a bad sector if it just so happens to be in the partition table and the right place the drive can look like it is unpartitioned.

Some partition software can recover the partition by searching the entire disk for the data then repairing the partition table information blocking out the bad sector. If I remember Paragon’s version will do that.

 

[dfs4]

I formatted the D drive accidentally a couple weeks ago and my RC Windows 7 installation files were on that partition. I asked a few people here and someone put a free download to this software and it worked nicely. Mind you it is tricky because I couldn't recover them after the first search but I kept doing it and it showed several copies of the same file in different folders and I recovered them all and I found the working copy among those. Btw here is the software they suggested,, hopefully it is still free to download. Give it a try.

You may like to take a look at this thread


This is good - they are doing it free for a short time - normally $70

EASEUS Free Data Recovery Wizard Giveaway: Get a Free Data Recovery Software Today Now.

Grab it anyway - even if you don't need it right now.

If you have the .wim - I can explain how to install using only that. You need to have either 7 or Vista already installed - it's quick and easy.

 

[Torch]

I had a non-NTFS partition with lots of data on a secondary HDD (which I normally unplug during Windows reinstallations due to an unrelated issue). I installed Windows 7 on my primary HDD. Once I booted into Windows I noticed there was an extra drive in My Computer with the same capacity as my secondary HDD. On opening the disk manager I saw that it had completely reformatted the partition on the secondary HDD as NTFS!

WHAT THE @#&*???!!! How the hell can it do something like this without ANY WARNING WHATSOEVER?! The data is permanently lost as it was a TrueCrypt encrypted partition and the keyblock would have been overwritten by the NTFS metadata at the beginning of the partition.

If it was a wholly encrypted disk that appeared as an uninitialized disk without a valid MBR/GPT then it's understandable that an OS might initialize and create a new partition automatically (as TrueCrypt forewarns). This disk had an MBR with one partition. It's the same as plugging in a disk with EXT3 or HFS partitions and Windows wiping it out on it's own!

I fully believe that Windows @*#&$@ up the OP's partition automatically on it's own and without warning or reason.

 

[James Colbert]

Good recommendations here...I'll add Partition Wizard.

This thread is another perfect example of the usefulness of imaging software.

Good luck!

James