So I was doing backup of my entire home network on a TB storage. Right when I was about to backup my Vaio laptop, the system got hung for some reason (not because of backup since I didn’t start anything). Anyway, I powered off the laptop and started it back, got the error that it could not find the hard drive. Opened the laptop and checked the drive was instered, took it out and tried all things and options but it will not boot up, still gave me same error. Fine. At that moment with F2 key I went into Vaio recovery mode (built in ROM I guess) and after some time it got me to a recover GUI and gave warning that if you check Agree and click next system will be recovere to the factory default configuration etc. I rebooted looked for any other option, but no luck. I decided to put it the drive into an enclosure and then will recover the data on a desktop and will reimage the whole thing or will try the VAIO recovery then. But got a little impatient and tried the recovery option hoping to get to the next screen in which I might find some other option. But kumbakht it start recovery right away, within 5 second I cancelled it. But it was done 6 already.
OS:
WinXPSP2
Symptoms:
Anyway, next morning I bought the enclosure next day and connected my hard drive to a desktop. It will show a 8gb partition which VAIO recovery created partially, and the rest of the 72gb is showing as unformated partition.
I tried Partition Magic. It didn’t give me option to Undelete the partition, nor it gave me any hope of any kind. Now I am running GetDataBackNTFS utility for more than 24hrs and its only 16% done so far.
Question:
Any suggestions, how I can undo partition that VAIO recovery created and get my data back.
Re: Partition created - wanna recover old partition/data
In windows computer management > Disk management, do you see anything when drive is hooked up to the PC? It should show unformatted partition, right click on it and reactivate partition...
I did not have same issue as you but I had to get data off one of the drives and got the enclosure, etc but could not see the full drive partition and then this is how I happen to get in.
Re: Partition created - wanna recover old partition/data
No. It was a single partitioned drive, factory installed=80GB. So no partitions in other words. VAIO recovery created a small 8GB (probably could have enlarged it to max disk size once recovery was done. The rest of 72GB is shown as unformated, in Disk Management and in Partition Magic also. Since partition does not exist, it cannot be reactivated.
