Need Expert Help on Recovering a Partition That Was Repartioned

Little Charley

Reputable
May 11, 2015
4
0
4,510
Hello Hard Drive Experts,

I messed up badly during an all-night attempt to repair my computer. I was transferring all of the data from a 1 TB hard drive to another identical one mounted in the same machine, one partition at a time.

After transferring one partition successfully from the old drive to the new drive, I deleted what I thought was the old partition. Minutes later (to my utter horror) I realized that the Window Disk Management program had interchanged the two nearly identical drives between sessions. What had been Disk 0 was now Disk 1 and vice-versa.

I had mistakenly deleted the wrong partition...

If it hadn't been 4 AM I would have just used a data recovery program to recover the partition, but I was so panicked that I had Windows Disk Management create a new partition, stupidly hoping that it would "find" all of the files. Big mistake.... All of the data is there (completely undamaged) but there is no information telling which sectors need to be concatenated to rebuild each file.

Is there any way at all to recover the original partition information that held the information allowing the files to be recreated?

Is there any other way to recover the files themselves, and hopefully the folder structure as well?

Thanks in advance for any and all help, suggestions, and advice!

Charley
 
Thanks Popatim!

I will check it out. I'm sure it would have been trivial if I hadn't repartitioned it. I've tried three different packages so far, and the best results seem to be from "GetDataBack" from Runtime software. (The others were EaseUs Data Recovery Wizard, and a Seagate program they gave me when I paid them to recover a physically damaged drive.)

But I will try TestDisk too and let you know which gives the best results. They all seem to have a trial mode that shows you what they can recover for free, then you have to buy the program to actually recover it. I will keep my fingers crossed...
 
I ended up trying four different software packages. TestDisk is freeware with a suggested donation, the Seagate program was "free" as part of their paid recovery service for a disk drive with physical damage, and EaseUS and Runtime Software allow you to see which files can be recovered before purchasing the package.

For what it is worth, the Get Data Back package from Runtime software was far faster, easier to use, and recovered all of the data with no problems. The other packages varied from no recovery at all to recovery of file fragments only.

The bottom line is that for me the Get Data Back program was the clear winner in every aspect and well worth the $79 it cost. Thanks for your help, everyone -- especially Popatim!