Hey I know when you delete a partition it only deletes the boot sector and the information is recoverable, Does anyone know any safe methods for recovering that data? A friend of mine mentioned Norton SystemWorks as a possible way to do so.

Recovering a deleted partition is generally alot harder than recovering deleted files.

I would opt for Norton recovery ;)

*bump*

Yes it's possible. What's the filesystem concerned?

And are you Linux confident? There's a good little linux programme that guesses partition tables and does a pretty good job of reconstructing the deleted partition.

There's a couple of decent free file restorers out there, but it would help to know the filesystem.

it's an NTFS file system that was running WinXP sp2, I'm not really that linux savy but with decent instructions I'm sure I could figure it out.

No worries, we'll try the graphical route first.

Here are two freeware programmes that look like they'll be useful:

http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/index.htm

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

When Windows went on a deleting splurge with me, a freeware programme got most of it back so these will probably be able to help.

The first one looks a little more professional to my eye, but I can't vouch for the performance of either.

Do let us know how you get on...and try and install them somewhere other than the drive affected if possible. Good luck!

running the PC inspector now, it says it's got about 16 hours of work ahead of it... fun stuff. Thanks for the assist Shamrock.

<font color=skyblue>Can I hijack this thread and ask the opposite question?

What if I wanted to securely delete items in a drive before tossing an old drive in the trash...is there a program for doing so, so that nobody would have a chance to recover and steal information like financial stuff from the disgarded drive? I was thinking that you had to pass the drive over a magnet and then beat it to death with a hammer, but I am told that people who know what they are doing can still get some information from that. </font>

the way the army does it is to run a program that writes a 0 or 1 at random to every sector of the harddrive thus overwriting any and all information stored on the drive. (in general when stuff is deleted it's still there, it's just ignored by the computer until it gets overwritten in which case it's almost certainly gone)

There is some software that overwrites the bits the data was stored on when it deletes stuff, look around, there should be some for free.

You'll need to do it more than once - I would suggest two, three or even four times, depending on how paranoid you are. NSA guidelines recommend 24 times, but that'll take forever and a day.

If you google for the Ultimate Boot CD that has a whole host of amazing little programmes, including a couple of hard drive wiping ones.