Reunite with your long lost partition

by Joey Celis Jul 9th 2008

"Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter" is a message most feared while booting up a computer. It could mean a number of things from a loose cable to something as serious as your partition being deleted. A loose cable is a simple fix but if your hard drive's partition is lost you just may have to call in the big boys who specialize in data recovery.

But before you pick up that phone you might want to try your hand at recovering the data yourself using widely available programs like Partition Find and Mount.

Partition Find and Mount searches your hard drive for lost or deleted partitions using 3 different scanning methods: Fast, Normal and Thorough. Each scan has their merits and should be tried in the order listed to recovery your partition. Once Partition Find and Mount locates the partition it will assign it a drive letter and mount the drive in read-only mode preventing further damage to the data. From there you can access the drive in Windows Explorer to recover your data.

Of course you will need a bootable computer to use the software. So if your only hard drive on your only computer has failed you'll need to give a friend a call to borrow their computer.

Partition Find and Mount comes in 2 varieties: Free and Pro. Both versions are nearly identical with the difference being that the free version is limited to data transfers of 512 KBytes/s while the Pro version has no speed limit imposed. Because DIY data recovery has many variables you may just want to see if the free version works for you.

Tags: partition recovery, PartitionRecovery, tools, windows

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Gardiner Westbound said 11:56AM on 7-09-2008

Better still, a rigorous backup regimen will save a ton of aggravation.

Barfy said 12:38PM on 7-09-2008

Bah! Macintosh hard drive icon with Windows window in the background?!

Geir said 6:06AM on 7-10-2008

Vista not supported as far as I can tell....

RecordOnlineGuide.blogspot.com said 10:12AM on 12-22-2008

Try these sites if you want to waste some more time and money

http://RecordOnlineGuide.blogspot.com

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