Toasted hard drive software or service suggestions?

[ghcnoob]

A friend accidentally deleted a partition on my original hard drive while installing a 2nd hard drive on my computer. We tried to repair it using SpinRite, but that did not get us anywhere. Sadly, nothing is backed up. Does anyone have suggestions on software or services to recover the data? I priced one service in CA that gave me a broad range of prices (1K to 4K or so...) Have you heard of anything more reasonable? I am in the Seattle area...

[DQPaulie]

There was something in this months MaximumPC magazine about recovering delted files, the one with the little spiders crawling around on the PC on the cover. Maybe if you hit there site for data recovery. One thing the story stressed was to not be using the drive immedietly after you deleted the files, put it in as a second drive or you may write over the data.

for free it used zero assumption recovery www.z-a-recovery.com

Don't know if this is any help, hope it works out for you.

DQ

for $100 it used getdataback for ntfs www.runtime.com.

[CORed]

If the partition was deleted but no new partitions created or formatted, what you need to do is create a new partition with exactly the same starting location and size as the old partition. Do not format. The data is still there, you just can't access it. If you don't have any record of your old partition settings, you will need to use some recovery software to find it. Don't guess. If you create a new partiton in the wrong place, you may overwrite someting criticql and lose it for good. I see lots of listings when I google on "recover deleted partition" I haven't used any of the products, so I don't know how well they work.