Is there a way to restore a partition or file table on a hard drive? I
have a seagate 100 g drive, and somehow (while erasing data) the
partition table or the file table became corrupted. Windows reports
that the drive is not formatted, but a file manager reports that the
drive only has 2/3rds of its stated capacity, the other third being my
data. Is there a way to restore the partition table or file table so
as to be able to access that 1/3rd data?

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 23 Oct 2005 20:54 PDT

mkane...

It seems there are several programs which will restore a damaged
partition table *if* you've first made a backup using the program.

As for restoring one without the luxury of a backup, there seems
to be only one program that stands out - Partition Doctor, by
PTDD software. Here's a page which illustrates the rebuild function:
http://www.ptdd.com/rpt.htm

The demo won't let you test the rebuild function. The full-featured
version costs $49:
http://www.ptdd.com/register.htm

Let me know what you think...

sublime1-ga

Get Partition Magic http://shopping.yahoo.com/search?p=partition%20magic
Works great to restoring partitions. You must be able to hook you hard
drive up to another working workstation. It has never faild for me.
Try this solution, if you need partition magic and want to obtain it
through other means other than buying it, they may offer a trial, and
if not. Well contact me for other methods.

You can also try testdisk
http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html which is Free. Also
several Linux live-cd exist which have tools specifically for for
partition editting and recovering.

While I agree the professional tools above are very nice, depending on
your drive setup, this may be very easy. Assuming you have ONLY 1
PARTITION, you can create a a generic partition table by loading a
simple old bootdisk and running "fdisk /mbr"; but use caution and only
as a last resort

Dear mkane,
last week I lost 90 GB of data simply accidentally erasing a partition
200 GB large. I would be in serious troble losing so many data... It
was about 3 months of work, not a so light issue.
I spent 3 days to find the RIGHT program to recover that data, and at
last try I have found the best one: it is WINHEX from X-Ray
Technologies.
It is a commercial product, but you could find some older working
version maybe using a P2P program.
It works very fine, you have to choose the partition to scan, then the
location where the recovered files will be saved, and then just wait
the low level scan to finish. This way I recover all of 90 GB of data
I lost.

Ask me for further informations,
Good Luck, Uranya

Try :
http://www.phoenix.com/en/Products/Trusted+Applications/Phoenix+FirstWare/FirstWare+Recover/default.htm
 
:__)

The best software to do this work are R-studio, download this file and
his serial from http://www.xs4all.nl/~junker/ ... I you need another
location use an search at google find by: r-studio "index of".