I'm at a loss...

[Alathald]

I just lost half my harddrive I just did a reinstall of vista and I merged two of my partitions together for it (yes they were next to one another). I installed Vista w/SP1 and updated all of my drivers and lo and behold, two of my partitions are gone! My other two are still there and all the data appears fine but the partition I had linux installed on and my media partition are just gone. I booted a liveCD, then gparted, and no go, still not there.

Anyone ever hear of something like this and if so anyone know if I can get my data back? BTW the missing partitions were the last two on the drive...

[Darkstar]

what did you merge them with? how many/what type of partitions did you have?

[unfaithfulsfan]

This might be a stupid question but did you perhaps inadvertently delete your partitions when doing the install?

[skier]

and you DO know that you can't make a partition with an OS larger than it was when the OS was installed right

[Alathald]

I used gParted and before my...disaster...I had my partitions set up like this:
[Vista NTFS 25GB][XP NTFS 15GB][Programs NTFS 80GB][Ubuntu ext3 ~80GB][Media NTFS 250GB]

I used gParted to delete the Vista and the XP partitions so I had 40GB of free space on the drive:
[40GB FREE][Programs NTFS 80GB][Ubuntu ext3 ~80GB][Media NTFS 250GB]

Then I installed Vista to the empty space and when I logged back in the last two partitions were gone. I checked in gParted and it looked like the had gotten deleted. I'm fairly certain I didn't delete those partitions (I can see me accidently deleting one but not two).

Any chance I can recover the data? my biggest concern is the Media Partition, there are hours and hours of rips and downloads on there and while it's not irreplaceable, I really don't wanna rerip all my CDs again...I know sometimes the partition table just gets screwed up and I hope thats what it is but I have no clue how to fix something like that.

Thanks

[smack323]

that reminds me- I need to back-up my media again today. have you tried any "undelete" or "recovery" software to see if you could find anything?

[bmaverick]

It's always a good idea to have different OS's on different hard drives. This way you can simply unplug one when doing a major change.

Sorry to hear about your misfortune.

[Alathald]

have you tried any "undelete" or "recovery" software to see if you could find anything?

I had not but I got Hiren's and used some of the recovery software on that, it's weird somehow I managed to make all my other partitions disappear but my media partition is visible. That's good enough for me though, I'm taring up the 'important' files and moving them to another drive, then I'll do a complete wipe and reinstall just to be safe. Thanks!

[smack323]

good to know you got it back.. I did a similar thing when I forgot to unhook my external media HD and did a XP install over that instead of the internal HD. I was only able to recover about 1/2 of my files- that sucked.