Recovery problem

[lofty]

I love windows!


Last night I decided it was time for my yearly format. I organized all my files into two hard-drives; one to format, one to keep.
I virus-scanned the drive I was keeping, so as to not bring anything nasty into my new windows install.

I went to bed. After I woke, I proceeded with the format.

I opened the windows setup, went through the steps. I got to the point where it asks you where you want to install, and allows you to create, delete, or clear partitions.

I deleted all the information off of the partition with the windows install, aka the drive I didn't want to keep. All my data was on my 2nd hdd.

Then I proceeded to delete the 2nd partition, without thinking

So, that's all my last years college work gone (10gb of 3d renders, 3d files, textures, pre-production work etc).
Goodbye 50gb steam folder.

Now, both of those could be recovered. I can re-download steam games and my college work is still on the college system.


However, there is one file I cannot recover.

I keep records for an archery club, and have the last 6 years of every archer's scores within a piece of really shit software. I usually have 2 backups of this - one on each drive and one on my pen-drive. However, my pen-drive went missing at the end of the last college year, and I've not taken it upon myself to replace it yet.
So I had a copy on each hdd.

Yeah, 6 years of records lost to the world. Great, 100 angry club members to deal with.



Now, I didn't format the 2nd drive, but i did delete the partition.
To the best of my knowledge, this means that the data is still on the drive in some form, and can be recovered through some processes.
I tried to recover it through the NTFS file system when I got windows re-installed, but to no avail. The program tells me the drive is no longer a ntfs, due to the partition being removed.


Is there any way in hell that I can get the data back, even in some form? I really need that file, or I'm gonna have to re-enter some 10,000 scores to the most user-unfriendly database in the world...

Cheers

[falther]

If you didnt touch your drive everything is still there....
Two ways:
1. there are dos based programes (freeware) to surch a disk for lost partitions which you can start from a booting disk or cd
or
2. you could use one of such programs running under windows on a second machine.
install your hdd with the lost partitions as a further hdd in that machine and let
the program surch.

In either way lost partitions should be found and you have to save the found partition structure to the inspected hdd. At the end all your data should be there - exaclty as it was before....

If you are unsure about that let it do someone who definitely knows what to do.
Spend that money - is your data worth it?

[shahij]

dont write anymore data to your hdd. better to talk with a data recovery specialist to get back successfully. if the data not worth if loss, then hava a try using winhex
best of luck

[Peterc]

Either pay for someone to do it or take the time to copy the scores yourself.
I believe there are some DR specialists somewhere on this forum. Depends on your location.

[wiseleo]

Should be fairly easy to recover.

I am concerned that you installed Windows, however. I don't think you installed it on that drive.

I think testdisk could have you back in no-time, but you'd need a sector-level backup before you take such shortcuts.

If you would like my help for a reasonable fee, you can PM me. You can either ship the drive to me here in California, or, if you have sufficient equipment, we can do it remotely.