Disk Managment, Need to Recover

Question

I deleted a 'I' drive from one of my hard drives, but it deleted my main partition, how can i recover it? It says it has 450 unallocated space. It took like 10 secs to work so i dont think it formatted it.

Answer 1

Use TestDisk to recover a deleted partition. I would need to know more specifics such as your OS (Win/linux/os x) and what type of partition table(MBR/GPT) and file system(FAT/NTFS/HFS+/EXT) to provide more detailed steps for how to use the program. The guides on the website are pretty straightforward and the menus are pretty simple so you can probably figure out how to use testdisk on your own.

Also, stop using the drive with the partition you are trying to recover until you are finished fixing everything. Use a different drive or some kind of removable storage to install testdisk on and perform the recovery.

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Fix for Windows 7:

Create a bootable USB stick or CD that contains testdisk on it. It is very popular and thus is included on many distributions including Knoppix, Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD), and Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK). Once booted, open a terminal and determine which the path to the hard drive you want to recover. fdisk -l; should give you a list such as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc. Confirm the correct drive by using hdparm -I /dev/sda; from the previous list. You can confirm the correct drive using drive make and model, size, or serial number. Now run testdisk /dev/sda;

• select the disk and "proceed"
• select "Intel" (if you have x64 windows and a UEFI instead of a BIOS and a HDD over 2TB then it is possible that maybe you went through the effort to setup "EFI GPT" but if you don't know what I'm talking about then probably not, so skip this option)
• select "Analyse"
• select "Quick Search"
• select you OS partition and press enter
• if everything looks good then "Write", otherwise you can try "Deeper Search" although that might find old partitions from a long time ago if you have reinstalled windows on this drive without wiping it in between installs. All the extra partitions it will find might confuse you.
• once you choose to Write, then Quit and hopefully everything is back to normal

Answer 2

You can also use EaseUS Partition Recovery, supports FAT, NTFS, Ext2/Ext3 file system. For both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. It recovers MBR and GPT partitions too.

Video demonstration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhd2JP8jomA

Article: NFTS partition recovery from EaseUS.