I bought an IBuyPower Desktop that came preloaded with Windows Vista, I reinstalled Vista on partition 1 C:/ which was 130gigs and a second partition 2 D:\ which was 170gigs. I also copied all her backup files and about 100gigs of other files to the D:\ partition. After a few months my wife and I agreed that windows Vista has too many issues so I used her old Windows XP Home cd and installed it on the computer. The only partition that showed up was the C:\, not thinking much of it I did a fresh install formating the C:\ 130gig partion. Now that the Windows XP Home SP2 is installed the D:\ is no where to be found. Windows disk management shows 170gigs of unallocated space. How can I recover the D:\ partition? Anyone else run into this issue?
How-To Geek Forums » Windows Vista
Missing partion when installing XP over Vista
(5 posts)
Your chances to recover the lost partition is very slim. You'll need to use some heavy duty tools. If you have copies of your old data, it's much better and easier to restore from the backup.
If you plan to create a new d: I suggest you to create an extended partition, then the drive d: inside the extended partition
So what everyone is saying is that the 100 gigs of data that was on the D:\ is lost when I removed windows Vista? When I installed windows XP it only showed the C:\partition that the vista operating system was installed on but never showed the D:\ at all. Now that I have XP installed, XP is seeing just 170 gigs of free unpartitioned space. If I create a partition on that space it is going to require me to format that unalocated space and the data will be lost forever. I am sure that since I never touched that unallocated space that maybe if I re-install vista or use some recovery program that it will find the last partition or that data on it. Does anyone know of a program that can do this? No one else has run into this problem?
FYI, the text mode XP installation still following old ms-dos convention about harddrive -- ie. only one primary partition containing c:, and additional drives must go into one single extended partition. While graphical part of xp is able to recognise several primary partition.
That's why when you create multiple primary partition from the gui then alter them later using xp text-based installation, you'll lose them all. Because the text based xp just fail to recognise them.
However, you can try this: create a new partition (preferably using 3rd party tools such as partition magic but be cautious: choose a utility that does NOT automatically format newly created partition) exactly the same type and size as the old one but DO NOT format it. Restart your computer. You might be able to have your files back. If this fails, then you have no other choice than restoring from your backup
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