Help needed badly! Partition now says free space??

[Xenepp]

Hi all,

I think this forum would be the best to raise this question on.

I have an external hard disk which I use to store all my work, music, files and everything. It is a 320gb drive.

I used to have a Mac and it was formatted in journaled HFS but I resized it to 250gb HFS and left 70gb odd for a future FAT partition.

I today decided to do just that and loaded Disk Manager in XP. When I tried to format the unallocated space on the 70gb partition (situated before the 250gb with all my data on it) the 250gb partition suddenly changed to "free space"!!

I have no idea why it did that or how to get it to go back. I didn't even touch that partition so I have no idea why it changed at all!!

So the question is, have I just lost 5 years worth of work or is there a way I can get this data back? I'm really freaking out here so if anyone can help me I'd be eternally greatful!!!

-Joel

[rchadwick]

There is likely a way. Choices, in the order of how important your data is:

1) Send it to a professional

2) Make an image of the drive, and use various DR software on the image

3) Just run DR software, although if you run anything that changes the disk, or unsuccessfully tries to rebuild the partition, you may ruin your chances.

[Xenepp]

Thanks for the response.

I can't afford to take it to anyone to rescue it unfortunately, I'll have to have a go myself.

Can you recommend a good DR application/suite?

Thanks again,

Joel

[kovacsp]

Dear Joel,

first, get an empty hard drive with the same size, or bigger than the original one.
You can use WinHex to create a copy of the whole disk either directly to the new disk, or to an image file on the new disk (using the clone disk function).
Make sure you choose the source and destination drives carefully, open them first to check the serial numbers (open disk).
Once you have the copy, keep the original one safe, and work on the copy only.
First, you can try to recover your files with winhex. In case you want some automated recovery tool, you can try stellar phoenix, easy recovery, get data back, etc.

Hope this helps,
Peter

[Xenepp]

Thanks everyone for all your help, it was very much appreciated. My drive is now fixed thanks to help from TerraNova via PM!

It turns out you can't have a HFS and a FAT32 partition on certain drives or in a certain way.. anyway a tool called TestDisk fixed my problem, I ran it in OSX (will not work in Windows since it uses pdisk which comes with OSX), it found the filesystem and re-wrote the partition table. Voila!

Hope that helps anyone else in the same situation!

Thanks again!

Joel