Data Recovery Digest

Fiddling around with Windows partitions can be a risky business. It is very easy for something to go wrong and often it does. If a disk is not partitioned correctly then it can lead to all sorts of problems like a drive that appears not to have any data on it, a corrupted operating system or a disk that just won’t boot up at all. If this has happened to you then it is not the end of the world. There is a way to revert the error and it is not as hard as you might think. Although it will take a bit of time, doing it properly will make sure your system is restored to a good state.
Some programs on the internet will offer to restore your old partitions with a few clicks. This is not recommended. Relying on such programs is a bit of a risk and there is every chance that the partition could have something wrong with it. This will only lead to further problems down the line and perhaps a bigger headache than you already have. The better solution is to recover the data from the disk and then start the system afresh.
Even if looks like all your data has vanished, chances are it probably hasn’t. Formatting and partitioning changes the boot sector, the file table, the partition table and various other parts of the disk that are usually separate from where your data is stored. This essentially means that your data is still intact, but the operating system can’t find a way to get to it.
You are going to want to download a data recovery program. This will read through all the data block by block and ignore the usual structure of file systems and partitions that the operating system needs to run. Depending on a few factors, like the quality of the program and how badly scrambled the partitions are, these programs should be able to recover all of your data in one piece (although sometimes it may not be able to connect the filename to the file).
A good program to do the job is something like R-Studio. You can burn this program to a disc and then boot from it. This is a great feature if you can’t even manage to access your computer at all. Using R-Studio, remember to always back up the files it recovers to an external drive and never the same one as you are recovering from. Once all your data has been recovered, you can then do a full format of the corrupted disk and transfer all your data back over.
Following this method is a few extra steps that you might think aren’t worth your while, but they definitely are. Knowing that you are running a system with stable partitions is a great peace of mind and one that could save you a lot of hassle down the road. Using data recovery software that you can boot from disc you can recover all your files, clean the system and install everything fresh.