Accidentally deleted partition

[Eric]

Hey all,

After going through windowsxp setup, I accidentally
deleted a partition with all my data. This drive had only
1 partition and it is my not my primary drive. I can boot
the OS on another. I have not formatted the drive and I
read there are ways to retrieve a backup boot sector. What
is the easiest and most efficient way to retrieve my
partition back. Thanks in advance.

- Eric

 

[CS]

Hey all,

After going through windowsxp setup, I accidentally
deleted a partition with all my data. This drive had only
1 partition and it is my not my primary drive. I can boot
the OS on another. I have not formatted the drive and I
read there are ways to retrieve a backup boot sector. What
is the easiest and most efficient way to retrieve my
partition back. Thanks in advance.

- Eric

Go here and download BootIt Next Generation:

www.terabyteunlimited.com

Shareware, fully functional for 30 days. Fits on a floppy disk. You
can use it to undelete your partition. DO NOT write to the drive in
the meantime.

 

[Plato]

Go here and download BootIt Next Generation:

www.terabyteunlimited.com

Shareware, fully functional for 30 days. Fits on a floppy disk. You
can use it to undelete your partition. DO NOT write to the drive in
the meantime.

Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but I dont believe a PC saves
"undelete" info on the hard drive for partitions. It's my understanding
that the partition is simply recreated.

In other words, lets say I had a win98 HDD and deleted the partition by
mistake. "Most"
of the time one could just recreate the partition and all would be well
assuming the
drive parameters in the bios were EXACTLY the same as when the HDD was
originally fdisked.

Now lets look at another similiar example. Lets say I had a dos 6.22 HDD
and did a format c: By defualt an "unformat" file would be saved on the
HDD drive thus you
could use the unformat dos command to unformat the drive and all would
be OK.

However, if you did a format c: /q on the HDD no unformat info would be
saved so one
could not use unformat in that case.

So I guess my question is, how does BootItNG "recreate" the original
partition?

 

[CS]

Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but I dont believe a PC saves
"undelete" info on the hard drive for partitions. It's my understanding
that the partition is simply recreated.

In other words, lets say I had a win98 HDD and deleted the partition by
mistake. "Most"
of the time one could just recreate the partition and all would be well
assuming the
drive parameters in the bios were EXACTLY the same as when the HDD was
originally fdisked.

Now lets look at another similiar example. Lets say I had a dos 6.22 HDD
and did a format c: By defualt an "unformat" file would be saved on the
HDD drive thus you
could use the unformat dos command to unformat the drive and all would
be OK.

However, if you did a format c: /q on the HDD no unformat info would be
saved so one
could not use unformat in that case.

So I guess my question is, how does BootItNG "recreate" the original
partition?

Don't really know Plato. You would have to ask the folks at Terabyte
unlimited. Alex Nichol might know. I just know it works.

 

[Plato]

Don't really know Plato. You would have to ask the folks at Terabyte
unlimited. Alex Nichol might know. I just know it works.

Email to the Author of said util on the way

 

[I'm Dan]

Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but I dont believe a PC
saves "undelete" info on the hard drive for partitions. It's
my understanding that the partition is simply recreated.
...(snipped)...
So I guess my question is, how does BootItNG "recreate"
the original partition?

Plato, I don't know your background experience, but you sound like you
remember DOS well enough, so you probably also remember that, even in
pre-"recycle bin" days, deleted files weren't actually erased, they just had
their directory and FAT entries removed. The data sectors were still there,
abandoned, and all you had to do was figure out how to reconstruct the
directory entry. That was the secret behind Peter Norton's seminal
"unerase" utility.

Deleting a partition is much the same -- the partition's sectors aren't
erased, the partition table entry is merely zeroed out and the sectors
abandoned. If you can reconstruct the 16 bytes of the partition table
entry, you can resurrect the partition. That's what BootIt-NG tries to do.
If you haven't overwritten the data sectors, it can actually be done with a
high degree of reliability. In contrast, trying to "recreate" the partition
(as opposed to undeleting it) may not always work because even if you get
all the numbers right, some utilities will "do you a favor" and also zero
out the FAT/MFT so you're starting with a blank directory. That may cause
the previous files to become unreachable.

 

[Plato]

Plato, I don't know your background experience, but you sound like you
remember DOS well enough, so you probably also remember that, even in
pre-"recycle bin" days, deleted files weren't actually erased, they just had
their directory and FAT entries removed. The data sectors were still there,
abandoned, and all you had to do was figure out how to reconstruct the
directory entry. That was the secret behind Peter Norton's seminal
"unerase" utility.

Deleting a partition is much the same -- the partition's sectors aren't
erased, the partition table entry is merely zeroed out and the sectors
abandoned. If you can reconstruct the 16 bytes of the partition table
entry, you can resurrect the partition. That's what BootIt-NG tries to do.
If you haven't overwritten the data sectors, it can actually be done with a
high degree of reliability. In contrast, trying to "recreate" the partition
(as opposed to undeleting it) may not always work because even if you get
all the numbers right, some utilities will "do you a favor" and also zero
out the FAT/MFT so you're starting with a blank directory. That may cause
the previous files to become unreachable.

Thanks for the education Dan,

David F. from terabyteunlimited.com also sent me this:

"The file system remains on the disk if a partition is only deleted from
the mbr. BING will find the file system and build a partition entry to
match."