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After moving to SSD I deleted the System Partition (100MB) from my previous drive, causing mass destruction.

I tried to delete the System Partition which windows 7 creates (on my previous disc as I moved to SSD) and when I tried to extend the main partition size to include the new Unallocated Space it asked me if I wanted to convert the disc to Dynamic.

I simply pressed yes and the partition simply disappeared into unallocated space. All of my family pictures / videos lost.

After reading an article on Microsoft they said to recreate the partition with the same exact size, so I tried to do that but it didn't work. I did not format the drive at all when I created partitions.

How can I possibly recover the partitions?

Thanks!

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    Disconnect the drive and stop using it for now. Otherwise you may risk overwriting files.
    – Luiz Angelo
    Dec 6, 2012 at 19:28
  • Unless you were using Bitlocker, then I don't understand how deleting the 100MB partition would make anything disappear. It should just make Windows not boot. If you WERE using Bitlocker, then you pretty much just lost everything that was encrypted. :( If it's just not booting, have you tried a Startup Repair from the Windows disk?
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Dec 6, 2012 at 19:35
  • I think his problem was converting it to Dynamic.
    – Luiz Angelo
    Dec 6, 2012 at 19:37
  • Related: Can the Windows 7 system reserved partition be deleted without problems?, and Deleting Windows 7 System Reserved Partition
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Dec 6, 2012 at 19:45
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    @LuizAngelo Converting to a Dynamic disk shouldn't affect the partitions contents, it just converts them to "Volumes". See here: "When you convert to a dynamic disk, the existing partitions or logical drives on the basic disk are converted to simple volumes on the dynamic disk." I think we may not have enough info as to what ACTUALLY happened. :)
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Dec 6, 2012 at 19:49

4 Answers 4

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Disconnect the drive and stop using it for now. Otherwise you may risk overwriting files.

After you do that I advise you to download a LiveCD to try to recover that. I usually go with Hiren.

Download it, burn on a CD and boot from it. Once there, start the Mini Windows XP. Once in there, use the tools there to try to recover the partition.

The very first thing I'd do is to make and image of the disk to another place so you won't risk losing the stuff. It's been a while since I had this problem but I think Partition Saving can help you there. If not, there's other tools there. Give them a try. There's more tools on the Restored Version - the normal version has only free softwares.

If you don't have a spare disk/space to save the data you may lose some data since the files might be overwritten.

There's even a tutorial on Hiren's to help you recover data. Go check it.

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Thank you all, After trying numerous partition recovery tools I finally found one that worked. (Active Partition Recovery)

It allowed me to mount the deleted partition and none of my data was harmed.

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    Now make a backup. People neglect to backup personal data at home, but I'd rather have to tell my boss that the accounting data was lost, than have to tell my wife that her pictures were gone...
    – BillN
    Dec 8, 2012 at 0:07
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    Oh man, that was the first thing I did once I was able to get access to the files. :)
    – Elad Nava
    Dec 8, 2012 at 0:14
  • I am glad you succeeded on getting the data back. Now consider accepting/marking one of the replies as the solution. :)
    – Luiz Angelo
    Dec 8, 2012 at 2:14
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I dont think the partition is recoverable unless someone knows something i dont but a great data recovery tool that might be able to help you is GetDataBack

Simply download it on another machine and connect your drive to that machine and select that drive to recover from, then you can simply copy it to the other machine.

Im afraid that by creating that partition over it you may have overwritten it enough that the files wont be recoverable

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I don't believe that you will be able to recover the partitions in the sense that your drive will not look like it did before. But all is not lost.
If you are able to put the drive into another working machine, you could try using recuva on the drive to try and recover your personal files.
Or, if you have access to a linux machine, you could try using the built in NTFS undelete command.
Good Luck to you, friend!

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