How to undo a “active” command in DiskPart

Question

I tried using DiskPart utility in Windows 7 so that I could make my Windows drive as the boot drive( previously i had the drive on which Ubuntu was installed as the boot drive). These are the steps I follwed:

DOS > DISK PART > select disk 0 > list partition > Select partition 3 > Active

The output prior to these statements werent saved and so I am sorry, I can not display it to you. But they were as follows:

P1: 125MB
p2: 9 GB
p3: 148GB
p0: 140 GB
P4: 36GB
p7: 40GB
P6: 3994 MB
P5: 60 GB.

The same output was shown in the Disk Management window.

But after typing these commands, one of the paritions deleted!! Now the output shows:

Partition ### Type Size Offset

---

Partition 1 OEM 125 MB 31 KB
Partition 2 Primary 9 GB 126 MB
Partition 3 Primary 148 GB 9 GB
Partition 0 Extended 140 GB 158 GB
Partition 4 Logical 36 GB 158 GB
Partition 7 Logical 40 GB 194 GB

Perhaps Partion 5(p5) is gone!!! The partiton shows a free space!! And this effect was as soon as i typed in "active" command. I am screwd.. That was the most important partition, I had had. All my docs are instores in there.

Please help me retrive back my Partition 5.. :( Is der any way to undo the action?? Please help..

Answer 1

There are tools out there to help you, but you really have to know what you're doing; otherwise, they can do more harm than good.

A good commercial program I knew is Acronis Disk Director; I think version 10 was actually better than version 11 in some ways (like giving you more control over the recovery). They both have partition recovery, and they're easy to use; however, they're not free. Take a look if you're interested.

There's also TestDisk; it's free and probably more powerful in some ways, but much less user-friendly and probably much more dangerous. Feel free to try it, but if you don't know what you're doing, you might find that you'll just delete everything else instead.