(Solved) Recovering Hard Drive data from an Unpartitioned Drive

Vhdblood

Okay, my brother is a DJ, and as such, has just moved into the world of DJing with a laptop. He has a 240gb external drive he uses for his music and a few other things, because he goes back and forth between a desktop and a laptop. Now, when you run most of the DJ programs (Serato Final Scratch, Traktor, etc.), you want to have a really clean machine, and normally, at least on a Windows box, you don't even connect it to the internet, as that computer is now your living.

Anyway, he decided he needed to reformat the laptop. When he went to reformat, he saw a C: and a , so he deleted them both, assuming the was the Dell recovery partition. He finished the format and booted into Windows, and found that his external drive no longer worked. He took it to his desktop and he couldn't get it to read so he called me. It turns out that he had it plugged into a USB port in the computer when he reformatted it, and deleted it.

So, now he needs it back. He's supposed to DJ tonight, but he's just going to spin CD's like he normally does. However, he needs it back ASAP. It has some other data which he needs for other things he does. It is a huge part of him making a living.

Does anyone know a good, trustworthy program to use for this? It hasn't been written over since he deleted everything with the windows disk, and it is currently unpartitioned.

tl;dr - My brother deleted his entire external drive. It is now unpartitioned space. I need a way to recover it that is trustworthy.

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You need to rebuild the partition table. Simplest method, to do so get Testdisk and run it. Windows had fucked up my Linux HDD when I reinstalled it (I had not given any instruction to do anything to the drive, yet it still cleared my partition table, fuckers), after much trying, and trying, and running a variety of tools I had success with Testdisk. I assume the external HDD had one partition that encompassed the entire drive? Shouldn't be too hard. With some luck he might be able to use it tonight.

Vhdblood

So, if he physically deleted the partition with the Windows disk, all it actually did was kill the partition table?

Vhdblood

You need to rebuild the partition table. Simplest method, to do so getTestdiskand run it. Windows had fucked up my Linux HDD when I reinstalled it (I had not given any instruction to do anything to the drive, yet it still cleared my partition table, fuckers), after much trying, and trying, and running a variety of tools I had success with Testdisk. I assume the external HDD had one partition that encompassed the entire drive? Shouldn't be too hard. With some luck he might be able to use it tonight.

*Hugs* You are the best! Worked like a charm. You win the internets.

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So, if he physically deleted the partition with the Windows disk, all it actually did was kill the partition table?

If he did quick format, certainly. The non-quick format most likely does a (sub-par) job at shredding the data, but I don't know for sure.

Worked like a charm.

It's very easy yes. I had some trouble as it found a huge variety of partitions from old partition tables on the hard drive. It's pretty amazing as to how long some of that data survives. Especially seeing as my three major partitions filled up completely once in a while.