Devastating Data Loss

[Armin]

(10:22:17 PM) Metal Militia: Windows 7 deleted one of my partitions with hundreds of hours of unbacked up work on it
(10:22:24 PM) Metal Militia: do you know how to recover the data?
(10:22:35 PM) Metal Militia: I know I never talk to you, but this is devestating
(10:22:38 PM) Metal Militia: so I'm asking everyone
(10:23:01 PM) Metal Militia: Data Carving seems to be the only solution, but I have no idea how to go about doing it
(10:23:02 PM) Metal Militia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_recovery#Data_carving

[Armin]

Problem resolved; I got my data back. I'm off to back everything up.

[Blaze]

Good luck!  :D

[warz]

That wasnt a very descriptive first post. I'm guessing you're metal militia. Either way, very poorly executed.

[Armin]

That wasnt a very descriptive first post. I'm guessing you're metal militia. Either way, very poorly executed.

Indeed. I was rather distraught and in a hurry. :D

[rabbit]

I'd be kind of annoyed if I lost hundreds of hours of pornwork.

[iago]

Wanna post your solution in case others have the same issue?

[Armin]

Sure.

Problem: Windows 7 Disk Management apparently fudged the partition table when I shrunk the partition by 9GB. Windows XP install on this new 9GB free space deleted the important partition, leaving me with 180GB unpartitioned space.

Solution: Install TestDisk, run a quick scan, navigate to the "deleted" partition table, and "write".

[iago]

Nice, good to know :)

For what it's worth, you should never try editing partitions (especially shrinking) without a backup handy. :)

[Newby]

You should never do anything risky without backups handy. Hell, I still get scared when I type commands like "cfdisk /dev/hda" even when I know I have no intentions of modifying anything. Opening Disk Utility on Mac OS X still freaks me out, and all I plan to do is usually burn an .iso.

[iago]

Heh, true enough -- I get scared when I'm doing *nothing* and don't have a backup handy. I always have that sinking feeling whenever I know I don't have a backup.

[Armin]

Noted. While we're on the subject of backups, anyone one give suggestions of different backup configurations?

[Joe]

You should never do anything risky without backups handy. Hell, I still get scared when I type commands like "cfdisk /dev/hda" even when I know I have no intentions of modifying anything. Opening Disk Utility on Mac OS X still freaks me out, and all I plan to do is usually burn an .iso.

By the way, Disk Utility can now resize partitions, even the one booted from, with enough accuracy to be called a main feature of Snow Leopard. If you know Apple, that's near 100%.

[iago]

Noted. While we're on the subject of backups, anyone one give suggestions of different backup configurations?

I have a usb harddrive and a nightly task that copies my home folder to it. Pretty simple, but effective (and free :D).

Of course, if my apartment burns down, I'll be outta luck. I'll probably just commit suicide.

[Blaze]

It truly is the best option after data loss.