I fucking broke it.

[Tempest]

I installed a new hard drive (which I now suspect to be corrupt or broken, but that's neither here nor there) and my new video card today. I removed my two old hard drives (One of which I'm on now, because it still has windows on it), and I plugged in my two newer ones. One of these drives held about 120 gigs of files that I've been saving around for upwards of 5 years now, old stuff, personal stuff, etc. In my attempt to install Windows on the broken hard drive, I managed to format a partition on both drives. Is there any way at all to get back my stuff? When I look in "My Computer" and double-click my old drive (Which is now D), I get "The disk in drive D is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"

It never had windows on it or anything like that, I never needed it on more than one drive, I always just used it for storage. Never had any problems accessing it or anything. I think what I did was made a partition when I wasn't supposed to have one, but didn't actually format it. Is there any way to delete a partition without formatting the drive?

[ilovebrownies]

I don't know that much about the subject myself, (I managed to drop a 300Gb hard disk on the ground, and the disk wouldn't run after that) but I found this guide:

Link (http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1139)

Hope this helps

[opn4bzns]

If it was NTFS you can use NTFS Recovery (google it) to get them back. If you were using another file system there will be similar programs, but that's the only one I know of off hand.

[Beefynick]

If you had space on the drive to begin with and made a partition on it, there is a good chance that you did not lose any data. If your hard drive was full and you made a partition you are pretty much screwed to get the data back.

There are ways to delete a partition even if it had nothing on it. There are various programs out there that are freeware or shareware that will do this.

As for NTFS recovery, I would not suggest it unless your files were extremely important. The program is about $100 for a single license. It works sometimes, but it not guaranteed to work.

[BlackHood]

There are plenty of recovery tools tools around, the only trouble is that they are a bit long winded if you need more than one file. And you might accidentally find that porn you thought you'd managed to get rid of!

[suicidalme]

try downloading a linux operating system called knoppix and burn it to a dvd so its bootable from start up. then simply follow the instructions it gives you. this should hopefully bypass your problem and allow you to transfer files via usb.

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