Accidental thumb drive partition deleted ...tool suggestions to repair partition

[DaveLembke]

So tonight I booted my systems system up with OEM XP Pro CD and saw 2 partitions discovered. Thinking that they were both on the HD I deleted both of them. Problem is that the Thumb drive was detected by windows installed as a HD even though connected thru USB.

Checked with wife and she has of course work saved on it and nowhere else. Anyone have tool suggestions to recreate that partition. I am guessing that since it hasnt been formatted that the data should still be there? And upon fixing the deleted partition and not creating a new partition I should be able to have all her data back?

Seriously cant believe that her thumb drive was detected by Windows XP as a 512MB Hard Drive! I guess the motherboard that is a year old and supports bootable USB devices may be why XP saw it as a HD... GREAT 

Lesson learned... make sure all USB drive devices are not connected when going thru a Windows clean installation process!!! 

[Transfusion]

cgsecurity.org/wiki/Testdisk

[JJ 3000]

Lesson learned... make sure all USB drive devices are not connected when going thru a Windows clean installation process!!! 

Don't feel bad. I've done that before too.

+1 for testdisk

[DaveLembke]

Thanks guys... going to give that a try. Never heard of that utility before but definately worth a shot. I tried a software utility that I own called GetDataBack FAT and NTFS and neither of those are detecting the deleted partition. Hopefully this utility can do it!

[DaveLembke]

Well I tried that tool testdisk and it didnt detect any partitions. There was one menu that was confusing and I didnt find the feature documented as well which was it got  to A = Add and L = Load backup and ENTER as options, I didnt want to alter this drive in any way, so I just entered to continue in which it stated No Partitions Found or Selected.

I am building up my wifes system clean to a spare HD without altering the original HD, so maybe I will get lucky and she will have temp files there with her projects or something. Or else if gone, I will be helping her reconstruct her girl scout stuff since she is a girl scout leader and that's the data that she needs. Maybe she will have some printed copies of some for some of the stuff so that I can OCR it with my scanner etc to re-digitize it for her. Shes not going to be happy with me in the morning..lol

I learned long ago not to blow away the drive if still functional and data can be scattered and needed, so I perform a HD rotation on clean builds so that after the clean build if she needed something that I missed grabbing off the drive, its just a matter of plugging that sata drive back in and booting the prior drive to extract the data and then switch back to the new clean drive. Even when you are careful you can get bitten like I did..lol

[DaveLembke]

Well I lucked out! I didnt get the thumb drive partition repaired to acquire data off of it, but I forgot that I created a batch on her system that was part of a scheduled task to perform daily backups between C: and E: and E: and C: with xcopy /s/d/y switches as a sort of backup mirror to always keep the latest and greatest files duplicated between both locations. She had 95% of her important data still on the original HD, so she only has to reconstruct a few documents she was working on recently.

Really patting myself on my back this time for creating that backup mirror between C: and E: over a year ago as a reoccuring scheduled task.

Still have that messed up thumb drive if anyone points out any additional tools to test against it, and have since given my wife a new thumb drive with the same scheduled backup mirror.

[Dusty]

Try the free Easeus Data Recovery Wizard from here.

Good luck.

[DaveLembke]

Thanks will give that a try!