Recovering lost partitions

[Odaisé Gaelach]

A few minutes ago I was using Partition Magic 7 to merge two NTFS partitions on my two-disk RAID0. It was originally partitioned into six partitions: I was trying to merge paritions no. 4 and 5.

I used the merge option on Partition Magic to marge them together. It was in the process of "shifting data" when the power went out - a trip-switch tripped.

Electricity restored, I restarted the computer. The first three partitions are safe, no 4. is there - allbeit 10GB bigger and not mounted. Partitions 5 and 6 have disappeared completely (around 140GB of data).

The partitions might be gone, but I'm positive that the data is still on the drive. Does anyone have any suggestions on what tools I could use to recover it?

[Baloki]

Partition Magic doesn't have a recover or auto-continue feature?

[Odaisé Gaelach]

It's got an Undelete feature, but that only recognises partition no. 6, which is 30GB big. No. 5 is still missing, and that's the 110GB partition.

EDIT: Huh, according to the help file:


You cannot undelete a partition that has been completely or partially overwritten by another partition or file system.

The fourth partition grew by 10GB when I restarted, so it might have overwritten part of the fifth partition. Still, most of the data should be there if I look for it.

I used Partition Magic to check the fourth partition for errors, but nothing came back. I didn't run Chkdsk because I'm wary of mounting the partition, in case it destroys data from No. 5.

EDIT 2: Ah, it's okay now. A friend's offered to scan the drive for me and see if he can recover anything. Thanks for your help anyway. :)

[o_O]

A partiton and a filesystem are two different things. The filesystem is what holds the data, so corrupting that is what will lose your data. A partition is just a container, it doesn't use drive space. Deleting a partition could be considered analogous to taking the walls away from a room and leaving the stuff inside (files).

To recover data from a lost partition, all you need to do is recreate the partition and give it the correct type. If a filesystem has overwritten another, you may have lost all of the data, depending on whether or not the FS is journaled (which NTFS is, unfortunately).

The fifth partition is probably lost for good, but it would appear that the sixth has only been deleted so thoretically it should be possible to recreate.