deleted partition

[Jonathan_King]

Hello,
I accidentally deleted the partitions on my hard drive, and am hoping to find a way to recover them. They were both Windows partitions, dynamic volumes, and I deleted them with GParted. I immediately realized my mistake, and unplugged them so that my chances for data recovery would be the highest. I am not trying to recover the entire partition, only the files on it. The recovery programs I have found cannot scan a disk for data, only volumes visible in My Computer. In other words, unless they can find a volume to scan, they will not work. My question: if I made new partitions on the drive, and did a quick format on them, would I overwrite data? If I did create new partitions on it, would the programs be able to scan them for deleted files?
Thanks in advance,
Jonathan

 

[cboucher]

My question: if I made new partitions on the drive, and did a quick format on them, would I overwrite data? If I did create new partitions on it, would the programs be able to scan them for deleted files?
Thanks in advance,
Jonathan

Yes, that is exactly what it would do. Creating new partitions and formatting definitely will make it a lot harder to retrieve the data.

 

[Jonathan_King]

What data is overwritten when new partitions are created? Please forgive my complete ignorance of how partitions and formatting works. Would performing a quick format increase my chances of recovery?

 

[cboucher]

Mostly just the partition table information. A "flag" is set to allow the formatted areas of the disk to be written to, but the actual data is not overwritten at this point. Depending how important the information is you're trying to save, you might want to take it to a professional data recovery company. There are several free data recovery utilities out there you could try, but success with those is doubtful. Also, be aware that every partitioning or formatting operation you perform on this drive will make it less and less likely that even a professional data recovery service will be able to retrieve the data.