Ever press the wrong button?

I ghosted my friends hard drive (swapped a 250GB 7200rpm Maxtor with a 74GB 10,00rpm Raptor, put the 250 in an external SATA enclosure) and due to a few adult beverages accidentally formatted his recovery partition. It still exists, just empty. The larger, external ghosted disc is clean and already setup as an extra drive so no recovery from there. Is there a way to put the information back in that partition? Make system backup discs more often since I can't use recovery? I already set a system restore point thinking it would send the information there but I admit to not knowing much in this area. Thanks for any advice.......

 

depending on what you've done after the accident you may be able to recover the data that was there. programs such as 'file recovery' or Xways Forensics can recover deleted data as long as you didn't write back to the space it was once at with other operations. when you delete you only wipe out the sectors saying where the files are located at, not the files themselves, the data is most often left on the drive.

kc

 

The Drecovery) partition was formatted but not touched since, it still exists. I've never needed to use the whole recovery process because I've always kept backups on disc so hardware failure is what I see most often. I claim ignorance in this department and don't want to say I messed up someone elses rig. Is there a way to make it recollect data it uses for recovery?

 

all you can do is use the above mentioned type tools and see if the data is still there, if it's not or you've overwritten any part of it, then you screwed the pooch.

kc

 

Thanks for the quick reply.
I've looked through official Microsoft Windows pages and it involves more programming language than my limited Visual Basic allows me.
Is there any way to delete the partition, without disturbing the rest of the drive that you or any faithful AD members know of?

--I read a few more pages and did a different search at Windows homepage and it seems that just deleting it will be OK since the active files arent on it. I hope I read that properly... ---