Question : Problem: My WindowsPartition is gone

I have a PC (that had) Windows XP Home on the Primary partition of a hard drive. The hard also drive has a second partion with data on it. After  a recent reboot, the OS has failed to start, and I have tracked it down to the Filesystem Partition infomation is missing.  (by putting a second drive with Windows XP Home on it and making it the primary.)

I can see the unlabeld drive in My Computer, but get a message that the system is unable to see the drive when I click on it. In the Admin Tools/Computer Management/Storage/Drive Management snap in, I can see that all the other partions in the system are of type NTFS, but the partition label is missing and the Filesystem is blank on the original C partition. It is listed as healthy, basic and active. All the other partions are there with NTFS filesystems, also healthy, basic and active.

I installed Partion Magic on it, but it shows the partion as Unformatted.

As far as I know, the drive was not formatted nor the partion deleted. Not sure how this happened, but is there a way to recover the partion without loosing the underlying data (OS and programs)?

Thanks, Rich

Answer : Problem: My WindowsPartition is gone

Sounds like a fairly straightforward case of drive failure to me.

You can use use a data recovery software (I perosonally like Active@FIle Recovery) and very likely get back most of your data and individual files.

However, I have never been successful in "repairing" a windows installation in such a case. If I were you, I would save myself time by NOT trying to "rebuild" and just plan to install form scratch. I think your best course of action would be to get a new drive and reinstall windows, and then restore your data and settings from backup, assuming that you have ASR disk, etc. If not, I would still reinstall and save what data I could from recovery.

You could also take the drive to a "professional" for data recovery, but in my experience they are generally slow, very expensive and not real reliable. There are certainly some out there who are truly professional, but I have found them to be the exception rather than the rule.

Good luck.