Partition recovery

[Jarudin]

I installed Windows 7 the other day and while installing / uninstalling stuff it hung. I don't know how that's even possible in 2010, but it hung.
I reset and Windows wouldn't load so I used the recovery thing.
After that Windows loaded again but two of my disks disappeared.
When I look in Disk Management I still see the two disks but I can't perform any operations on them.
I get the error "The operation failed to complete because the Disk Management console view is not up-to-date. Refresh the view by using the refresh task. If the problem persists close the Disk Management console, then restart Disk Management or restart the computer.". Needless to say nothing works, refreshing, rebooting, disabling/enabling, unplugging you name it.

I've tried half a dozen recovery tools, free, trials, cracks and none of them seem to be able to do what I want them to do.
Most tools seem to agree though that the partition on either disk is still intact but for some reason it can't be mounted (I can't assign a drive letter) or easily recovered.
Any 'checks' that I've found possible report that the partition is doing just fine and dandy, but it still wont mount.

Both disks are 500GB and full of data that I'd rather not loose and seeing how everything is still seemingly intact I see no reason why I can't just whip the disk and get it mounted.

Does anyone have any experience in recovering partitions, or recovering files?

--Jarudin--

PS. I did find one program that worked alright: DERescue Data Recovery (v2.75) seems to be able to recover files without a breeze (doesn't even require 8 hours or scanning) but I don't feel like paying $60 just to recover some data and I can't find a key or crack anywhere (I can for almost any other program).

[psyren]

I had a problem like this a little while ago.
If you have another HDD/computer, stick it into that and use the Windows disk manager on that to see what you can do. It took me several tries to get that going, but eventually it sorted itself (my Windows screwed itself when I used a ghost program to copy stuff from an old HDD to a new one).

EDIT: This is if you want to try assigning it a drive letter, seeing as you couldn't do it normally.

Otherwise, try Recuva.

[fohfoh]

I've never tried recuva... but since it's by the same group who made CCleaner and Defraggler, it might be a decent candidate if you really need to try recovering stuff.

[bcr123]

I've used the linux fdisk utility from a live-cd before for that sort of task.  The nice thing about the tool is it doesn't question your intentions, the bad thing is it can really mess shit up if you don't know what you're doing.

[bork]

I have run the Ubuntu boot CD to work on some of my disk problems before.  It figures that you know what you are doing and does not try to stand as a gate keeper like MS stuff does.  It can possible allow you to recover that data or trash your disk totally, it assumes that you are the expert.  I ended up on the trashed side a couple of times, two full 1TB disks went away.

On a Unix system, I have gotten away with writing a new partition table out to make one of the partitions bigger by growing it into a deleted partition.  As long as you do not format it, the directory is still there at the front of the original partition.

[TempestWing]

My knowledge of these issues is limited, but anyways.

First thing I would do is check to see if the drive is in good working order (jumper settings, etc.)

See if Linux can mount the partitions. If yes, then copy your files over to a different drive and repair/reformat your drives. If you can't mount the partitions, then my guess would be that the partition tables on those drives have become corrupt. (Or something like that)

Just try to isolate the problem. There could be lots of things wrong with your drives, so it might not be a great idea to blindly stab around for answers.

[Jarudin]

Thanks for all the replies guys.
I've resorted to using TestDisk, the most simple data recovery program I've seen yet.

It doesn't seem to be able to fix the partition but at least I can copy the files really easily.

--Jarudin--

[vuzedome]

R studio!!

[sapsa]

Did you try mount them on linux ? using live distro?

[Tatsujin]

I had a similar issue long, long ago. I just transferred the files to other partitions and reformatted the damaged ones.