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Recover data from Unallocated Backup Drive

Taff™
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Posted April 22, 2012 at 10:38AM

I must have been lapsing in concentration on Friday. I was restoring an image from a backup drive partition and stupidly pulled the power supply for that drive thinking it was the printer. (I know - don't grin like that!)

The upshot is that the NTFS partition became unallocated. About 350Gb. Any tried and tested solutions or am I resigned to reconstructing the backups as best I can? It's impossible to replicate some of the material on there anyway.

I have tried Recuva which is hopelessy inadequate although it found some picture files and reported that the they had not been overwritten.

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Jollyjohn

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Posted April 22, 2012 at 10:56AM

Have a look at Testdisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk I have used it in the past to recover data from a wrongly formatted partition.

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robinofloxley

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Posted April 22, 2012 at 11:37AM

Partition Wizard (or the Bootable CD for non booting machines).

Partition Recovery Wizard is listed as an option in the left column when you run the app.

Very quick, has worked for me on occasion. Never tried from pulling the plug though.

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Taff™

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Posted April 22, 2012 at 12:20PM

Thanks Guys. I'll try these suggestions later and report back. May be some time as guests for lunch but might manage to slip away. Mind you the length of time these scans might take (3 Hours for Recuva yesterday) I might as well pop to the pub and enjoy the lunch whilst they are searching.

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T0SH

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Posted June 14, 2012 at 4:29PM

Make yourself a Linux Live CD, boot to it then mount the problem drive to get access to your data, from there you can copy paste it to an external or internal drive

I regularly use Slax linux on a bootable USB stick or live CD for data recovery

Cheers HC

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HondaMan

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Posted June 25, 2012 at 9:34AM

I have a number of external drives (NTFS) and it is not at all unusual for one of them to become "unassigned". My simple quick fix is to go into disk management and simply assign a new drive letter. All the data remains intact and thus far, I have not lost a single file.

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