One of those things you never want to do. I have two drives in my PC, one 35GB drive and one 72 GB drive. When I initially installed Vista, I erroneously installed on the smaller of the 2 drives. As a byproduct of that mistake, I have to constantly monitor how much disk space I use and today I decided I would reinstall vista on the larger drive. Since I bought the upgrade instead of the full version, I had to install XP first. Meanwhile, I was trying to keep track of Josh and get ready to brew the Witbier, so I was multitasking.
When the blue setup screen of windows came up, I decided to delete the old partitions and recreate them, and, at one point, I had split the larger drive into two smaller partitions. So I thought to myself that I was cleaning up the partitions to create a solid drive that shouldn’t bother me about diskspace so much. As soon as I deleted the third partition I froze, realizing what I had just done. In a panic, I rebooted the PC, hoping that the partition table hadn’t been written to the disks, but I was too late. Most of the data on that disk is purely backups from my PowerMac, but there was a small sliver that contained media from the windows install that I was redoing and it appeared to be long gone.
I knew the data was still there on the disk, but Windows couldn’t see it. After some clever googling, I found TestDisk, an Open Source disk recovery tool, and decided to give it a shot, as I had nothing to lose. To my surprise, it worked perfectly! Quite user friendly (for a command line tool) and after a reboot, all 250GB of backed up data showed up on my drive.
The lesson here? Never partition drives unless you are paying attention to what you are doing… I got lucky, but it isn’t always that easy.
