Hi, I’m in a tough spot! I accidentally deleted the only partition on my 500gb FAT32 hard drive, containing ALL of my most valued data. Papers for law school, my entire music/film collection, my entire my documents folder. I only run Windows xp.
Yesterday i tried testdisk, but it said it wasn’t able to write anything and that i might need to log in again as administrator. I was however able to see my lost partition and list the files on it. I was so relieved, as it was all there!
Then i tried to write the table but of course it wasn’t able to, as the program was in no-write mode (or whatever it calls that). So i logged in as admin and tried again. It didn’t find it anymore, and after 3 gruesome hours of deep scanning, all it said was that the partition could not be recovered because the drive appeared to be to big. Just moments before, it had found it in an instant!!
Now when i log in just as me, and run the prog again i dont see anything anymore about me not being admin and the program not being able to write anything. Whenever i “quick” scan, it starts to do a whole scan that takes ages to complete and i can guess what the result will be.
I downloaded demo versions of partition table doctor 3.5 and active@ partition recovery, but they also start a scan that will take at least 130 min to complete. I have the impression they won’t take me any farther than testdisk would.
I have found forums with the “advice” to try to rebuild the fat partition manually, but they don’t give a detailed description of how to go about doing so.
Should i try altering jumper settings etc, like testdisk says can be a solution for size related issues? The size that is indicated in the drive list is correct, however.
Please help!!!