Oops...

Hi all,

I have a Dell 1520 on wich I wanted to make a partition.
While partitioning I fell asleep and left the laptop without DC power, when I woke up the next morning I thought partitioning would be finished. I turned on the laptop only to found out it gave me an error: "Missing operating system". Now I really don't care about that. I'll just format the HDD again except there is school stuff on it wich I need for the next schoolperiod.

I was wondering how can I get that stuff back? If someone could help me out that would be more then great!

 

Boot with your Windows XP/Vista disc and try doing a repair.

If that doesn't work, try using a Live Ubuntu CD.

 

if it doesnt, try to do a parallel install

 

Tried to do a repair with Vista install, didn't work, it seems it can't find my primary partition (On wich Windows is installed).

I can't as it cannot find my HDD (C:/)

 

it cant find the HDD? hmm.. have you tried to run diagnostics on the HDD?

try holding down Fn + Power Button for 5 seconds then release the two keys, it will start the PreBoot System Assesment. or you can choose this: turn on computer then press F12 during Dell logo, choose IDE/HDD diags.

 

Tried to install Vista again to see if I had any partitions at all. I have 3 as of now, one is fat16 other 2 ntfs. So there are partitions, but they all show empty. Except the FAT16 one wich has used 2.5 gb of his 2.5 gb.

EDIT: Doing diagnostics now.
EDIT 2: Finished diagnostics, found nothing all seems fine and running.
EDIT 3: Got Ubuntu live cd, what's the next step, did a memory test can't really find out what to do next.

 

I dont know about Ubuntu, haven't open the package that I requested from them.

So what you mean is the HDD is not recognized during installation?

 

I'll post a picture, explains more then 1000 words they say.



Here you can see there are 3 partitions of wich only one has no available disk space anymore. The other 2 are clean altough I'm sure that's where my Vista is installed on.

 

use a linux live cd!

 

So tell me then, how does it work!

 

From your picture it looks like you formatted pretty much the entire C drive which would include your OS... All the space on the primary partition is free which means there is no OS readable data on it. At this point you will not be able to just parallel install and simply read the data. You will need some application that can recover data from deleted partition, problem is how to get that program to read it.

I haven't used the linux live CD much so I can't comment on that but maybe it has tools for this built in.

You could pull the drive, get an IDE to USB adapter (that supports laptop drives) and plug the drive into another PC somewhere to make it a readable drive, then install something that can recover data from formatted or erased partitions (I think this does http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1 but not sure off the top of my head)

Similarly if you don't have access to another computer you can try to create 2 partitions and install windows onto the last partition. Since generally windows will write data from the inside out, you could try make the first partitions 100GB (with the hope that all your user data was written to the first 100GB of the drive) and the second the remaining and install windows onto that (idea being to make the second partition, where you install windows, as small as possible to avoid possibly overwriting your data).

Once windows is installed, load an application to read from your other partition.

Remember that data on a hard drive, even when repartitioned is probably recoverable as long as you didn't do a full format on the partition since. However once that area is written over with other data it becomes a completely different story, so whatever you do try to avoid writing data to a portion of the drive you think your school work is on so you don't accidentally write over it and render it unrecoverable.

 

No I didn't do a format yet.

Thanks for all your info! I'm going to try to plug it in to another computer and try to see what I can recover. Thanks!!!!