Can I recover a vanished partition?

December 28, 2008 7:36 PM

A partition on my secondary hard drive disappeared over the weekend. Am I screwed?

I have a Dell Vostro running Vista. Also installed is a second (slave) hard drive which was partitioned into two drives that registered as D: and I: (it was set up this way on installation, I don't really know why).

I left my computer on over the weekend. When I went in this afternoon, the I: was gone and I could not find it. Along with any data on it. Shortcuts to applications or files on that drive get error messages saying the drive does not exist. Any chance I can recover the data that used to be on the partition?

Any guidance you can offer would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

posted by mr_felix_t_cat to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Reboot and see if it comes back. D's there, so your physical connections are fine.

If it doesn't come back on reboot, burn a Knoppix disk and boot that it, it should discover your partitions and mount them r/o, I think.

It's been a while since I've used Windows, but as I recall, drive assignments were always flakey; plugging in something else (like an ipod) could re-assign everything below D.
posted by orthogonality at 7:44 PM on December 28, 2008

Yeah, your partition isn't going to just disappear. It's just not being detected. I second ortho's advice: reboot, and failing that, download and burn a lightweight version of a Linux distro onto a CD-R. You should then see all your partitions. Recover your data and reboot without the live CD.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 8:14 PM on December 28, 2008

The GParted is a free partition editor kinda like partition magic.
Download the live CD or usb key version to have a better view of your partition.

Also you can download Hiren's BootCD, it's packed with software to recover and troubleshoot partitions (not linux)

Also BartPE might be a useful tool.
posted by PowerCat at 9:47 PM on December 28, 2008

If it is really gone, ontrack can most likely get it back for you:

http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/hard-drive-recovery/

They can be very expensive, but they do get the job done. A company I worked for had them do a recovery on enterprise class storage (lots of hard drives in a big enclosure for servers) some years ago. They knew their stuff and got the job done quickly and with no trouble ( I was surprised it was even possible).

They can recover data lost due to corruption (some software problem) or failed hardware.
posted by DrumsIntheDeep at 10:27 PM on December 28, 2008

You may have done this already, but what does your Disk management console show? The partition may still be there, but may have lost it's mapping to a drive letter...
posted by ayerarcturus at 12:30 AM on December 29, 2008

Don't mess with your partition table yet. Your drive is most likely just fine. It's probably just Windows finding yet another way to screw you.

Windows will refuse to work with more than one partition on an external device if it thinks it's a flash drive. This is deeply stupid design. I can think of no good reason for Windows to be designed this way, but it apparently is.

I'd do the usual thing for small Windows problems: shut Windows down and restart it (do not hibernate it - shut it down entirely) and then plug the drive back in.

If you still don't see your I: drive, go looking for its partition in the Disk Management console as ayerarcturus suggests. If you can use Disk Management to give the partition a letter that works, fine. If not, boot a Linux live CD and transfer the files you care about to something Windows will actually let you use. Knoppix is the traditional one for this, but any recent Ubuntu disc will also give you full read/write access to all your files.
posted by flabdablet at 12:52 AM on December 29, 2008