Data Recovery: Windows installer nuked Partition Table

[Impotence]

hey all,

I have yet another data recovery task! I was reinstalling windows on a friends machine and i used a live cd to resize the old windows parition and then created a 30GB partition at the end of the drive into which i copied game saves, pictures (from his camera), music etc. unfortunetly, a windows 2000 installer kindly tried to 'repair' the partition table while trying to recover a failed install.

All the data should still be on the disk (it was on the end of the drive), but how would i go about reading it with no partitions on the drive?

 

[izzy007]

use stellar phoenix to recover the data to another drive then just format this and reinstall windozzzeeeeee.

I posted a topic for help last week but had NO REPLIES. Worked it out by myself and cost me a new drive

 

[Impotence]

I am somewhat confused as to how im meant to run a windows executable on a computer that doesn't have any sort of operating system on it.... I would also prefer not to have to purchase any software!

also, rule 1 on a system with ANY lost data is NOT TO CHANGE THE CONTENTS OF THE DISK IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER! (so read-only)... i could pull the drive and put it in another computer, but thats going to be awkward!

however, i have found a nice looking LiveCD that seems to do what i need called HELIX (which is obviously free (beer and speech), they make there money by charging for support/training).

 

[Big B]

What exactly did Windows do here? I know it whacked things out of place, but specifically, what did it do or attempt to do?

As far as fixes, I was thinking that going into the Recovery console with a 'fixboot' command might be the trick, but I dunno if you've tried it. IIRC, that's the same thing as doing an fdisk /mbr for Windows 9x.

 

[izzy007]

I am somewhat confused as to how im meant to run a windows executable on a computer that doesn't have any sort of operating system on it.... I would also prefer not to have to purchase any software!

also, rule 1 on a system with ANY lost data is NOT TO CHANGE THE CONTENTS OF THE DISK IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER! (so read-only)... i could pull the drive and put it in another computer, but thats going to be awkward!

however, i have found a nice looking LiveCD that seems to do what i need called HELIX (which is obviously free (beer and speech), they make there money by charging for support/training).

Well thats what i meant. If your data isnt worth spending money on to recover, then theres no point in wasting time to actually recover it.

I spent money on a hard drive on which i installed windows and used stellar phoenix to recover the data on the new drive. I made a 3 gig partition and the rest was the partition to put the recovered data on. Stellar took about 10-12 hours to get my 130gigabyts worth of data but it was worth it.