*cries*

I have a little story of my day so far so gather round and hear tales which everyone should take a lesson from.

Yesterday I got more RAM for my computer (woohoo finally my desktop is up to 1gb) and installed it. Now I noticed Windows was running a little sluggish still since I had been installing and testing a lot of security and administration software. So I decided that I would reinstall Windows.

Cleverly, I have a separate partition for Windows, Data, and Media. So when want to reinstall Windows I just can the Windows partition and reinstall again. I've been doing this for years. Well today is the day it decided to go all wrong!

I delete the partition like usual (not sure why I don't just format it, just go in the deleting habit for some reason, never had a problem before) and then go to create a partition again... well to my suprise THERE WERE NO PARTITIONS AT ALL! The best part of this all, Windows doesn't believe in the we'll show you what changes you've picked and double check with you before we apply them, we'll just apply them once you click okay. So now I'm sitting here with my partitions gone! This is everything I had on my computer sitting on a partitionless hard drive now. All the pictures I've ever taken, all the 3d/2d/design/web/programming work I've done. A lesson to learn? BACKUP EVERYTHING!!!! ALWAYS!!!

So now I'm running recovery tools to attempt to recover about 300gb of data (only 10gb that I'm really worried about though). I will never ever ever use any microsoft partitioning tool again.

I'm sad 5000 pictures of my friends and I over the last few years are gone

Hey man, seriously sorry to hear. I hate it when stuff like this happens.

Good news is that i've always had luck with recovery tools managing to get files even 2 formats back so you should hopefully get most of it back that you need!

Dang man, that's terrible. I have been there and know how that feels. There is nothing to say except good luck and I hope you get your files back.

-Z

So far active paritition recovery is coming up with like 20 fat12 partitions... what is fat12? lol.

I'm sure I can get it back, but it bugs me that it just kinda deleted all the partitions.

Though I guess I should have known better lol.

So sorry to hear that man. I have experienced the same before (feeling like ). really hope you can recover your lost data.

Isnt Fat12 the name of the data type? I always get confused with all that.

Really sorry to hear about that dude, ive lost alot in the past due to crappy microsoft, cant they just make a happy operating system that always runs happy for us?

So after about 3 hours of analyzing the disk to find partitions and coming up with nothing I decided I'de throw in an old drive and install windows to see if I could have any more luck in windows. Ended up using a piece of software called TestDisk. Found the partition information in a matter of seconds and had the disk up and running (and backing up like crazy) .

TestDisk seems like a useful little recovery tool

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Free as well!

I'm definitely going to be using a better paritition manager from now on. That was a little too close for comfort.

Aden - Fat12 as far as I know is the very first version of Fat which is a file system (the way files are written to and stored on the hard drive). It was made in the late 70's and can hold a whopping 32mb file system! Fat16 and Fat32 came later supporting bigger drives and now Windows uses NTFS (a microsoft made filesystem) as it's filesystem. Linux has a lot more types of file systems and they can get pretty confusing. BUt just think of Fat (file allocation table) as how the drive knows where it wrote files

Jeeze that must suck. 5000 pics eh? Holy crap.

try "pc file recovery", i use that to get stuff, that i deleted even i formated my drive.

ouch... I once lost a few months worth of pictures and that was hard, I can't imagine how crappy it must be for you