Any way to recover deleted partitions?

[digerati]

My computer became infected with a virus, infostealer.banpaes that norton 2006 seemed unable to get rid of. I decided to simply reinstall XP pro, onto my 10gb C partition, while maintaining my files on the other two 50gb partitions (drive is 120gb sata). I'd done this countless times before just to clean out the system from time to time and didn't think too much of it. When I booted up into XP installer and got to the point where i would need to delete the C partition and reformat it, I didn't notice until too late that somehow my 3 separate partitions now looked like one 120gb partition to the windows installer (something that had never happend before). Before it fully dawned on me, I deleted my C partition, effectively deleting the entire drive. Not sure what to do, I made another 10gb partition, installed XP pro, and now am wondering how I can recover the files from my lost 50gb partitions. Is this possible without having to employ some expensive recovery software or recovery service? The files lost are not earth shatteringly essential, but quite a few of them are ones I will truly miss. Any ideas on anything I can do? Or should I just let go and move on? Thanks

 

[mlakrid]

What you said while making some sense, I dont see how it could have happened, you have to navigate to choose to delete the logical partition for EACH drive, there is no way that I know of that will format across three distinctly different partitins, can someone please correct me if I am wrong?

Thanks!

 

[digerati]

Well, what happend was, what was normally 3 distinct partitions, appeared in the windows installer to be only one large partition. I am guessing that perhaps that virus screwed with the partition information or something and the windows installer just ended up treating the 3 partitions as one big one.

 

[lancer]

well whatever happened, it doesn't really matter does it.

Yes there is a way to recover the info. digerati, do you live in the states?


edit: i was going to suggest another program:

but this one is free, i've neved used it though

 

[digerati]

yes, i do live in the states

 

[Maroon]

have you format the drive after you saw that you'd lost all your partitions? i've never come across such a situation. How many partitions do you have now, i mean i've written that you made 10Gb partition< and the other space is unallocated? if yes it's possible to restore lost partitions with for example Recovery Expert, or the similar prog. if you now have the whole 120Gb partition, may be it's worth to try GetDataBack Fat or NTFS(depends on what file system you had before)

 

[Electronic Punk]

I bought a piece of software as this happened to me recently, will dig its name out when I get home.

 

[lancer]

sorry dig, not sure why the link didn't appear... the program i was going to suggest is called easy recovery, but it costs about $2000, i have it but obviously cant share it.

This program on the other hand is free, i've never used itm but its supposed to be good.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk