[Sussex] Win98 eating a partition table

[John Crowhurst]

On Fri, March 25, 2005 13:01, Capt. Redbeard said:
> Hi,
>
> Not that such a thing would ever happen to me of course but, just as a
> what-if question, how do you recover lost data on a hard-drive in the
> following situation?

Ok, if you know the exact geometry of the hard drive before the change,
you can change the partition information with Linux fdisk, then in theory
you should be able to mount the partitions as they were. A quick format
may have simply wiped the FAT and the partition table, so recovering the
partition table from your notes should get some if not all the data back.

If you don't know the geometry, then the chances of recovery become much
harder. There are methods of recovery, costly methods of recovery...

There are specialists who will recover drives that have been formatted,
even dropped, and the police can recover data by painstakingly stripping
the magnetic material layer by layer from a hard drive, but that would be
prohibitively expensive.

If you made a backup, you could simply repartition and reinstall, perhaps
losing a few days data.

--
John