[ale] any easy way to recover deleted partitions and their contents from HD ?

[Joe Knapka]

"James P. Kinney III" <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com> writes:

> On Sat, 2004-04-17 at 16:05, Courtney Thomas wrote:
> > James,
> > 
> > Thank you again.
> > 
> > The partitions deleted were DOS FAT16. Can I use a linux emergency disk to try 
> > to recover ? There were 4 partitions, all exactly 2008MB.
> 
> I would recommend a Linux emergency disk instead of a DOS floppy. 
> 
> The critical issue is whether or not data has been overwritten by the
> partitioning process. 
> Consider the bad ASCII art below:
>                _____________________________
> Original disk  |  1   |   2  |   3  |  4   |
>                _____________________________
> new partition1 |  1   |   2  |              
>                _____________________________
> new partition2 |  1   |   2                |
>                _____________________________
> new partition3 |      1     |      2       |
> 
> The difference between original and 1 is simply the deletion of the two
> partition markers for partitions 3 and 4. This is recoverable (usually)
> by remaking the partitions in the exact same spot as before. 
> 
> Version 2 requires the deletion of 2,3,4 and creation of a partition 2
> that fills the disk. This is also most likely recoverable. Delete 2 and
> recreate 2,3,4 in the original locations.
> 
> Version 3 is not good. Since new partition markers have been created,
> this will have overwritten a small portion of the disk.

It's my belief that all the partition-location-and-size data is
stored in the boot sector partition table, rather than as markers
on the disk platter itself. If that's the case (and I could be
wrong), then it should always be possible to recover by recreating
the original partition table, *provided* nothing has been
written to the disk since the partition table changed.

-- Joe

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