Randomly missing partition

[paimei]

Help!! I somehow lost a partition of a secondary drive as I reformatted my primary drive.

The partition I lost was all my backup data. I orginally had a slave hard drive split up into 5 partitions. I reformatted my primary drive and the next time I started it up, the last of the 5 partitions was gone. The other 4 partitions, however, are perfectly fine. I tried to find the missing partition in Partition Magic and it says the space is "unallocated".

Does anybody know how to fix this or how this even happened? I am completely puzzled. Any help would be very appreciated. Thanks!


Steven

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Most likely case is, you formatted the wrong partition on the wrong drive! If you have not yet installed anything on or over it, there are utilities that can recover a formatted HD or partition.
http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm
http://www.recovermyfiles.com/
etc.
Or perhaps it was a dynamic drive and the 'Hosting OS' was formatted away. Tough...

 

[paimei]

The odd thing is that the partition is not acting like it accidently got reformatted. If it had been reformatted, I could at least use the space of the partition. In my case, the partition sort of disappeared from existence. When I explore the hard drive, the last out of the 5 partitions just isn't there. There is no way to click on it, I can't move anything into or out of it, and I can't even reformat that partition if I wanted to because it is simply not there.

When looking at it in windows, it's like when I lost that fifth 100GB partition, my hard drive went from a 250GB five way partitioned hard drive to a 150GB four way partitioned hard drive.

One possibility I can think of is that something within the hard drive got messed up and it somehow thinks the end of the hard drive is at the beginning of the 5th partition. Also, I recall the Master Boot Record being updated when the primary drive was reformatted.

Any kind of help on this would be very greatly appreciated!

 

[RealBlackStuff]

If you still have an image of that partition, perhaps you can restore it (it should contain the proper full old MBR.
Otherwise I am out of ideas.