Lost Data From Re-partition

[ma1ic3]

I re-installed Windows XP on my computer with the recovery discs that came with my computer (I never got a plain Windows XP CD). After over an hour the recovery was finished and I realized that it had deleted both paritions on my hard drive. Originally, Windows XP was installed on one parition, while the other had photos, emails, music, videos, etc.. So now Im left with nothing but a huge partition for the operating system and a small one named "Recovery". Is there any possible way I can get any of the files on the deleted parition back?

[Soapy Sam]

Tell me you had backups.

ETA- Up near the top of the computers, links and the Internet page, on the RHS is a Data Recovery link. Have a look. I'm not optimistic though.
Meanwhile , do not load anything on your hard drive. If there is any possibility of recovery, it gets less every time you overwrite the deleted data.

[a_unique_person]

Yes, that's exactly what those recovery disks do.

The data should be there, if you don't touch anything, but what you use to get it, I don't know. Norton used to come with a tool that would scan raw sectors, find directories, and recover data that way. I did it once for my brother when he accidentally formatted a hard disk. (Lost a whole weekend....). However, Norton doesn't seem to come with that any more, so I don't know if anything else can do it any more.

[kevin]

haven't used this myself, but take a look at this. it looks like it should be able to do it, maybe even in demo mode.

http://www.partition-recovery.com/

[ma1ic3]

I had over a 100 gigs worth of stuff that was lost. Only a tiny portion of it was backed up.

I bought myself a 500 GB external hard drive for $300 and got ahold of a program called R-Studio which I think retrieved everything I wanted. I think that since everything I needed was on the second partition and the first partition was 30 gigs and probably located at the center of the hard drive, that there was plenty of room for new files to be copied without destroying the files on the second paritition.

I tried the partition-recovery. You boot off of a CD or floppy with the program on it and enter a bios-like interface. I didn't really like it. The R-Studio program works just like any other program and will scan the hard drive that you want to recover files from and build a directory of the deleted files and folders. At that point you can right click on anything you want and choose "recover". You can choose a single file or a folder with tons of files.