Restoring a Hard Drive Partition

[Harper]

I just got this emails from a freind of mine, I am just wondering if you can help this (it too late at night for me to think right now, and as a rule, I do not work on computer after 10:30pm at night)

I have accidentally format my hard drive using “Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management”, I select the drive, right click and format. Can you post to Tech form and see if I can unformat my hard drive? Can Norton System Works help? Can you get the Norton System Works 2004 for me?

Oh-kay.... Now I found that in my expience in the past that System Works has been a waste of time when i come down to recoving hard drives. But it some one had any success stories, I would like to now.

I am thinking MAYBE Partition Magic 8 to recover the drives?

However if you have any other suggestions to restore a partition, I would like to know.

Thank you.

 

[mre30]

Well it is going to be kinda hard because he used microsoft format. Partition magic would have worked if you used the same program from my experinace.

 

[mre30]

Wow a nice list you have there

 

[Harper]

WHOA! Thanks for list dude!!!!

 

[Harper]

well, this is a suprise....

Okay.... This is strange. I have just plugged this drive into my test bed to see if I can restore data....... and IT'S ALL THERE.

Not sure what is going on here. But it's good that I still have access to the data.

It turns out that this drive was one of the drives that was on a RAID. And the person that did delete this drive confirmed with me that it was THAT DRIVE that he accidently deleted every thing from.

So I am a little concerned that is going to happen if we plug this drive back in to machine that it oringally came from.

Personally, I am thinking about suggesting the following :-

Since the data does seem to be there, I can planning on suggestiong the following.

BEFORE RE-INSTALLING THE DRIVE, remove the RAID, and make sure that there is nothing there on the other drive.
THEN INSTALL this drive.
Then Rebuild the RAID again.

Sounds good???

 

[Harper]

And I thought RAIDs Mirrored Each Other

I just go my hands on both drives. My freind his really lucky.

One of the Drives has nothing on it
The other Drive still has his data there.

The data looks like it's all there with no coruption.

This is a good thing for me.



One thing that does puzzle me was that I under the impression that RAID MIRRORED EVERYTHING in real time. There for you make one change one drive, the change is then carried over to the other. It's a VIA RAID on an ASUS P4P800 Deluxe Motherboard.
I am trying to work out why this did not happen here when the partition got deleted.

 

[wead]

if the drive with the data is fine and the other one has nothing on it right why dont you just copy the data to the new drive. ALSO will an upgrade to windows 2k from 98 keep all the program files/files if I keep it fat?