I deleted a partition, but did not reformat over it. Recuva seems to only look in the remaining partition, is there anyway to point it at the unallocated partition?

Thanks =)

Hi MystiKaL, and welcome to Piriform.

I wonder if undeleting the partition would be a better solution for you.

I've never used this program, but I have it on my Hard Drive hoping I never need it, but just in case I do:

Paragon Rescue Kit 9.0 Express: (Freeware)



Hope that may help.

Sounds promising.. trying it now and will get back =)

Thanks for the Help!

I have a 250 GB drive that had hundreds of pics on it. I had accidentally deleted the partition before I backed up the pics, even though I already had the music & vids off of it. Then, I created a 50 gig partition, & 200 gig partition that I formatted under windows management tools before realizing what I had lost.

I then went back, deleted both partitions, recreated the single large partition, & formatted it. Under regular scan, Recuva found nothing, but when I enabled deep scan in options, & I also enabled restore folder structure so that if any pics were the same name in a different folder that they would not be overwritten, then I was able to recover them all.

Windows doesn't overwrite files when formatting, even in a long format it just uses the "long" format to check for bad sectors that it has trouble reading or writing from & marks them bad. So the references to the files are removed. Running Recuva in deep scan mode can take over an hour, or even several hours depending on processor speed, speed of the harddisk, & harddisk size.

But it was worth it, because I got every one of them back.

P.S. It is easier to wade through the results it gives you, if you click the top bar to sort by folder name, then recover all those you needed that were in the "My Pictures" or other folders you had pics in. This way, you can be sure you get all the pics from that folder, instead of a nit picking here or there!

In addition, its far easier to click your left mouse button on the beginning pic, then drag the slider down (or middle mouse roll it down) till you reach the end of the folder & pics you want to recover. Then, hold down shift, & click the ending pic.

Right click the highlighted area & choose "Recover highlighted".

For best results, please recover to another drive so you do not run the risk of over-writing any files that are still deleted before they get a chance to be recovered!

IMHO if the "only" thing that has happened is that the partition has been deleted and the space has not been reallocated then by far the easiest, quickest and safest option in the first instance should be, as Dennis has suggested, to attempt to recover the partition. Just a few bytes should do it

Only if that failed would I go down the file recovery route. Interesting tips and tricks for doing so listed above though.

If the OP has tried the Paragon software I'd be interested to see how they got on.

There's a shortcut to using Paragon Rescue Kit Express which I have mentioned before but on this occasion it slipped my mind. Apologies to MystiKaL for that.

After downloading the Program Installer, which is an exe file, don't run it, as I think you have to go through a registration process etc..

You can extract the ISO Image File from the Installer, and burn it straight to CD with something like Ashampoo (Free) or ImgBurn (Free).

It does save some time and messing around.

And of course even if you never have to use this, and have no idea how good it is, I would download it anyway and burn it to CD, just in case. It has to worth a blank CD.

Thanks for the help guys.. Thing is, i was quite afraid to reformat over it cos the general consensus was that it will only worsen the problem. The partition had 420GB of its 488 capacity used up (Seagate 1TB barracuda HDD)

So i chickened out and got some professionals to do it. Pretty straight forward job.. cost me 150 dollars.. singapore dollare that is.. which is like 100 USD..

had really important data in there so couldnt risk it =P

Hey MystiKaL - good news.

Just FYI if it happens again, simply recovering the partition usually doesn't do any reformatting ... that's why it's the safest option. Imagine you've lost the key to your apartment. You know everything is in there, but you just can't get inside. Usually, deleting your partition is a bit like losing the key ... and partition recovery just finds the key again without affecting what's inside. If that makes sense!!

But the main thing is you're sorted. Like you say if it's valuable stuff it's better to be safe than sorry and it's worth paying a few bucks