Really hope someone can find a way around this...

It all started with me backing up all my music on a Lacie portable disk drive of 80Gb.
I did that in order to format the main drive and do a fresh install of XP.
The DVD Drive is not working so i started preparing a USB-key boot installation of XP.
Here starts the problem.
I used DiskPart to partition the USB-key but unfortunately i selected the wrong drive and i ended up with having my 80Gb Lacie loosing the configuration info and information off the disk (diskpart - clean).
The data is still in there i guess. I did not format or partition the drive but wrongly used the command CLEAN from DiskPart and in a blink the disk is not recognizable any more.
Is it possible to access the disk from a different OS than XP?
Is there any way to retrieve or reassign the lost configuration info so that i can access again the data on the disk?
Is there anything i can do?

Yes, there are things u can do.

If U want to be 100% sure u won't do any more harm to your backups, take the drive to a pro.
If u want to do it yourself, there is a risk that u cause more problems with inproper use of softwares, but u might succeed as well, the choice is yours.
If u chose this latter option, U will need either a disk editor to restore the partition table from scratch (U will need some knowledge on disk structures as well), or use some kind of file system recovery software.
I have never used TestDisk, but it might be able to help you. Take into account that it writes some datato the very drive u want to recover, so it is not that safe either...

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Thank you so much man, already to have a reply is a relief... at least i know now it is possible to do something about the drive.
I accept the advice to refer to a pro but still i would like to understand and eventually give it a try myself...
i have 6 external disks and sure i don't plan to mess around with those like i did on this one but knowledge comes from experience and i would like to learn from this mistake not to repeat it in the future.

Any further direction is really welcome...

Thanks a lot... it did its job and fixed the configuration info, so now all is back again...

Great!

what kind of configuration info did u fix?

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Well, what happened in the first place is that i accidentally erased the configuration info from the disk so that windows would not see anymore his properties. Basically when i would plug it in by usb port windows would see the drive but would not recognize anymore the content, formatting the drive is the only solution offered by the os.

I knew the data was still in there, i did not format or erase the content. What actually does the command CLEAN in DISKPART i believe is to clean up the identification of the disk. You can always call the program up by RUN / Diskpart

What i did with TestDisk is to rewrite the boot partition of the drive with new information so that the os would recognize the drive and allow the content to be seen.

I can't believe I found someone with the exact same issue as I'm having, and found a solution.

I too was setting up a USB-key, or USB flash memory stick to boot a system to do repairs on a heard drive from outside of the standard Windows environment. In this case I've set up BartPE.

But I too executed the DISKPART CLEAN command with the wrong disk number selected when I was preparing the USB-key. In my case the USB-stick was DISK 2, and instead I had DISK 1 selected which is a 500 GB SATA Maxtor drive.

In the post above this one, SkEyeDiver reported that he used TestDisk successfully to repair the boot partition (MBR/'Partition Tables'). And I'm guesing he ran it from the USB-key that no doubt loaded a PE environment. I see from the TestDisk 6.4 Wiki that it's supporting BartPE:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_6.4_Release

I'm wondering it anyone else has had experience with this. I've actually used TestDisk unsuccefully in the past. But from what I understand, it can repair the MBR and partition tables from backups that evidently are not wiped when the CLEAN command is executed from DISKPART.

Before I use anything to write any kind of repair data to the drive, I'd really like to hear from anyone else who may have had experience with this issue. Not surprisingly my finances, like many others, are low at this point. But I may just see if I can find a good price on a new hard drive that I could image this corrupted one to as has been suggested in other threads in this forum.

Kind thanks for any feedback.
TS