Making Partition Active - Data Lost In The Process?

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Damager

2125 posts

Uber Geek

#55912 10-Jan-2010 00:38

Hi Everyone,

I was given a friend's hard disk drive to recover the data from.

Looking at it, there are 2 partitions on a single 250GB HDD. C: which has an incomplete windows installation and is 100GB and a D: which has data on it, 150GB . It is this data that needs to be recovered. I used my usual data recover program and i can see all the files with no problems so recovery will be easy. It'll just take a while to copy the data to another HDD.

In My Computer, the D: partition cannot be seen. In Disk Management, this partition can be seen.

I was thinking, if i just make this partition active, then problem solved? It'll become visible in My Computer and the files can be accessed as per normal.

I'm worried that making this partition active will lose the data in the process :(

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Cheers

Steve

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CYaBro

4586 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

#288605 10-Jan-2010 07:10

Making the partition active probably won't make it visible again.
If the data is important I wouldn't be doing anything to it except recoverying it first before trying to repair the drive itself.

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

OldRepublicJedi

53 posts

Master Geek

#288681 10-Jan-2010 15:00

I agree with CYaBro... you can recover the data already, so first things first, get the data off the drive, then once you have all the data off, you can play around with partitions without worrying what will happen.

heretohelp

360 posts

Ultimate Geek

#289058 11-Jan-2010 18:47

as the other guys said. recover data. delete partitions hopfullly it will now show you that you have unallocated space you can then just format it all good. or you could try gparted in an linux ubuntu boot disk if windows wont delete the partition for you

Hu? did i do that?
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bobsys

1 post

Wannabe Geek

#289071 11-Jan-2010 19:35

Hi,

Assign a drive letter to the partition in disk management nad you can access to the files in regular ways (windows explorer/total commander etc)

Damager

2125 posts

Uber Geek

#289123 12-Jan-2010 00:37

Thanks for the replies guys. in the end i did recover the data first before playing around with the invisible partition.

@bobsys. welcome to gz :-) i kept getting an error when i did try to assign it a drive letter so luckily i held of making it active and trying other things. i couldnt even get the partition's properties to view.

after recovering the data, i deleted the partition and reformatted the whole hard disk and its good as gold again :-)

drive has no sector errors, was just a badly corrupted partition table.