deleted partition -- USB external drive

[biteme]

Well, I made a big HUGE boneheaded mistake. I deleted the WRONG partition! Don\'t ask. This is what I get for not paying closer attention to what I was doing.

I\'ve checked out some partition and data recovery utility demos from a few different sites. I downloaded them and tried them out.

Here\'s the problem. The deleted partition was to a 40 GB external USB drive. I had the drive set as one big-ass partition. The drive is NOT being shown; not mounted. There\'s a little utility in the sys tray and it says \"NO DRIVE DETECTED\".

I think this is why the recovery utility demos I downloaded are not able to see the drive; and so I am not able to recover the partition. Is there a way to force win98 to mount the messed up drive?

Any help would be HUGELY appreciated. Thank you in advance!

[Sinbard]

Which model USB Ext. drive is it? I\'m wondering whether the most direct route is going to be carefully opening it up, plugging the IDE drive inside directly into an IDE cable on your MOBO, and then using a data recovery tool to drag it back to reality.

Once done, you can slap it back into the External USB casing, and carry on as usual

[biteme]

Hi, Sinbard.

Thanks for your suggestion. Its an ACOM Data drive. The HD itself is a Maxtor.

I thought about doing what you had suggested. There doesn\'t seem to be a way to open the case up, however. Not w/o breaking it apart. There are no screws or anything. I guess its a matter of how important the data is to me. And I was worried that I\'d destroy the drive and not be able to recover the partition and data on top of that.

Damn my idiocy!

[belgareth]

The biggest problem is that when you delete a partition, the FAT is wiped out. It\'s likely that the files still exist but the index telling the drive where to find them and the sector info is gone. It also means that the links beteen the non-contiguous files is gone. I have tried a number of high class recovery tools with little luck because of the lost sector info and links. A professional shop specializing in crashed drive recovery can probably recover most of it but it is VERY expensive. You\'ll probably end up just starting over.

[Sinbard]

Heh, there is always a way in without breaking anything /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif Cases like that will have \'snap\' locks on them where a little arm on one half of the case \'latches\' onto the other half of the case holding them together - with some careful exploration with a very fine screwdriver (like a watch/jewelers screwdriver) you can find all the latch points (usually 4, sometimes 6) and then prise them apart gently...

...and open sesame /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[Sinbard]

</font><blockquote><font class=\"small\">Quote:</font><hr />
The biggest problem is that when you delete a partition, the FAT is wiped out. It\'s likely that the files still exist but the index telling the drive where to find them and the sector info is gone. It also means that the links beteen the non-contiguous files is gone. I have tried a number of high class recovery tools with little luck because of the lost sector info and links. A professional shop specializing in crashed drive recovery can probably recover most of it but it is VERY expensive. You\'ll probably end up just starting over.

<hr /></blockquote><font class=\"post\">

I actually have a military grade tool that literally recovers anything, from anywhere - but as you can imagine, I can\'t really pass it around /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif

I\'ve recovered 180gb of data from a 6 drive dynamic volume when 2 of the drives had caught fire /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

[belgareth]

I\'ve seen a couple of those tools and would love to get my hands on them. But for the rest of us, it is usually unrecoverable.

[camusflage]

EnCase is what you want, if you can find a copy of it...

If not, Partition Magic may be able to save you.