Any Hope for 0 KB Files After "Partition Mishap"

[DRS.Usenet]

I don't think there's any hope for recovery of these files, but just in
case, I'll ask....

During a boot disk replacement that went wildly out of control, my 250
GB non-boot drive somehow got partitioned at 149 GB. I think it might
have happened with an old copy of some Windows component that couldn't
handle big drives got run, although I would have expected 137 GB.
Anyway, I didn't notice it during the bootdrive swap, so I used the
250...copied over about 30 meg of stuff so my xxclone would go quicker.

Anyway, after I got the boot drive swapped and working, I noticed that
my 250 was partitioned in two chunks (149 and 98 or something like
that), and now 72 of my files are listed as having 0 KB. The
timestamps look correct, but no size to the files (they should be
between 0.5 and 1GB each).

I tried PC Inspector File Recovery, and it shows the stuff I had copied
over earlier to speed the boot drive xxclone process, but there's
nothing under 'lost' or 'searched'. Actually, I don't think the 'lost'
function worked, so maybe there is some hope. These were mostly just
digital TV shows I recorded, so there's plenty more of them where they
came from, so it's no big deal, but I thought I'd give it a try.

Ideas, or should I throw-in the towel?

--Dale--

 

[R. McCarty]

Partition Recovery is the product I use for situations like this.
There are other "Partition" recovery type tools, I'd Google
around and see if you can locate a Freeware/Shareware type
of tool and avoid the expense of buying a full-featured product
to undo this situation.

 

[Andy]

I don't think there's any hope for recovery of these files, but just in
case, I'll ask....

During a boot disk replacement that went wildly out of control, my 250
GB non-boot drive somehow got partitioned at 149 GB. I think it might
have happened with an old copy of some Windows component that couldn't
handle big drives got run, although I would have expected 137 GB.
Anyway, I didn't notice it during the bootdrive swap, so I used the
250...copied over about 30 meg of stuff so my xxclone would go quicker.

Anyway, after I got the boot drive swapped and working, I noticed that
my 250 was partitioned in two chunks (149 and 98 or something like
that), and now 72 of my files are listed as having 0 KB. The
timestamps look correct, but no size to the files (they should be
between 0.5 and 1GB each).

I tried PC Inspector File Recovery, and it shows the stuff I had copied
over earlier to speed the boot drive xxclone process, but there's
nothing under 'lost' or 'searched'. Actually, I don't think the 'lost'
function worked, so maybe there is some hope. These were mostly just
digital TV shows I recorded, so there's plenty more of them where they
came from, so it's no big deal, but I thought I'd give it a try.

Ideas, or should I throw-in the towel?

Have you tried running chkdsk without the /f to see what it could do?

 

[DRS.Usenet]

Have you tried running chkdsk without the /f to see what it could do?

Good idea. I didn't think of that. It said that there was "free space
that was marked as allocated." Those might be my files?

I know there are some free and some non-free tools "out there", but I'm
not so motivated to try them willy-nilly. I'll search on the "free
space that's allocated" and see if there are any tools that are known
to handle that (most handle deleted files and some handle specific
types, like jpg images and such). But... if you happen to know an
appropriate course of action, please advise. Thanks.

--Dale--

 

[DRS.Usenet]

Partition Recovery is the product I use for situations like this.
There are other "Partition" recovery type tools, I'd Google
around and see if you can locate a Freeware/Shareware type
of tool and avoid the expense of buying a full-featured product
to undo this situation.

Actually, I recovered the partition with diskpart.exe that comes with
XP. So although I've got all of my space, many of my files show having
zero bytes.

This guy apparently didn't get very far recovering his data (although
his was a considerably worse situation):
http://groups.google.com/group/micr....help_and_support/msg/b08ac7d2259d97e4?hl=en&

I ran chkdsk and it said there was free space marked as allocated in
the volume bitmap.
If I ran chkdsk with the /f, will it create files from the allocated
stuff that it finds? Or does it just fix the volume bitmap so that my
files (gasp) can be overwritten?

--Dale--

 

[R. McCarty]

I would not run Chkdsk w/ F(ix). As you suspect, it will probably
lessen the chance of getting any data back.

 

[DRS.Usenet]

Partition Recovery is the product I use for situations like this.
There are other "Partition" recovery type tools, I'd Google
around and see if you can locate a Freeware/Shareware type
of tool and avoid the expense of buying a full-featured product
to undo this situation.

I downloaded the crippleware version of acronis disk management suite
(whoa, what a PAIN! - the thing was huge - took forever to download,
the install needs to phone home, you gotta put in your email DURING
INSTALL and then it sends you a key, but I thought it was just going to
spam me, so I put a fake one in, then it took an act of congress to get
a version that didn't phone home during install). And it looked like
almost everything that application had was plain OS stuff. I'm sure
the bit where you can change partition sizes without loosing data is
non OS, but I didn't need that, and the crippleware wouldn't allow it
anyway. I just wanted to see if it could see the lost files, and NO it
couldn't (after the most laborious install in recent memory).

So that's it, I gave up. I ran chkdsk /f and everything is great
except for about 40 hours worth of saved-up tv shows are gone. But
like I said, plenty more where those came from.

--Dale--