Win8 has deleted Win7

E

Ed Cryer

I had dual-boot on my computer until recently. Win7 and the Win8
development preview. I booted into Win8 and it reported that it needed
repairs, and then set about doing them. When it finished I could only
boot into Win8, and soon found out that it had deleted the other
partitions on the hd.

I want them back ASAP. I have a backup of the whole hd from a week ago,
but I'd rather try getting the latest partitions back before I resort to
that.

Does anybody have experience of recovering deleted partions?

Ed
 
S

SC Tom

Ed Cryer said:
I had dual-boot on my computer until recently. Win7 and the Win8 development preview. I booted into Win8 and it
reported that it needed repairs, and then set about doing them. When it finished I could only boot into Win8, and soon
found out that it had deleted the other partitions on the hd.

I want them back ASAP. I have a backup of the whole hd from a week ago, but I'd rather try getting the latest
partitions back before I resort to that.

Does anybody have experience of recovering deleted partions?

Ed
Man, that sucks, Ed!
I've never had to recover a lost partition other than when replacing a new drive, then restoring it from image. But
thanks for the heads up. I think I'll wait a bit before trying the Windows 8 preview. <Phew!>
 
T

Tom Lake

"SC Tom" wrote in message

Ed Cryer said:
I had dual-boot on my computer until recently. Win7 and the Win8
development preview. I booted into Win8 and it reported that it needed
repairs, and then set about doing them. When it finished I could only boot
into Win8, and soon found out that it had deleted the other partitions on
the hd.

I want them back ASAP. I have a backup of the whole hd from a week ago,
but I'd rather try getting the latest partitions back before I resort to
that.

Does anybody have experience of recovering deleted partions?

Ed
Man, that sucks, Ed!
I've never had to recover a lost partition other than when replacing a new
drive, then restoring it from image. But
thanks for the heads up. I think I'll wait a bit before trying the Windows 8
preview. <Phew!>

No one (You're a rare exception, SC Tom) seems to heed the MS warning not to
install
Developer Previews on anything other than a test system. They put it on
their only
computer - the one with all their data - and then blame MS when things go
wrong.

I installed it in Sun's VirtualBox so if it screws up (which it already
has - twice),
my Win 7 installation isn't affected.

I'm sure the beta (The Developers Preview is only alpha) will be more robust
and probably
include a full version of IE 10 rather than the Developer's Preview which
doesn't even
have menus or anything.

Tom L
 
K

Kirk Bubul

Man, that sucks, Ed!
I've never had to recover a lost partition other than when replacing a new drive, then restoring it from image. But
thanks for the heads up. I think I'll wait a bit before trying the Windows 8 preview. <Phew!>

Remember the 1995 Microsoft Motto: "Windows ain't done 'til Lotus
won't run."
 
P

Peter Foldes

Ed

It is there in plain black and white that installing the Win 8 preview can cause
this issue if not installed clean on a clean hard drive. Next time read the warning
that MS posted with the read me. Aside from the latter the Win 8 is a Preview
release which means that it is a quick assembly of the Alpha versions of Win 8 and
not a Beta.
At present Win 8 is in the Alpha 3 version which only the approved testers have at
this time. Again Ed, this Win 8 is a Preview version only. The Beta version will be
in the Beta 1 stage sometimes in the middle of Nov and only the approved Beta
testers will have the Beta 1 version. The public version will be available sometimes
in the first quarter of next year.
So to repeat again Ed. What happened to you with the Preview version is your own
fault and nobody else's. Next time read the complete print before installing an
Alpha in Preview for the public of Win 8 or any other software.

--
Peter
Please Reply to Newsgroup for the benefit of others
Requests for assistance by email can not and will not be acknowledged.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
http://www.microsoft.com/protect
 
E

Ed Cryer

Well, now that you've ranted like a pompous oaf and got that off your
chest, maybe you can put your better self into gear and recommend to me
some good software to recover the partitions. I know they're still there
because I've run Easeus recovery prog and it sees them.

Ed
 
A

Andy Burns

Ed said:
Well, now that you've ranted like a pompous oaf and got that off your
chest, maybe you can put your better self into gear and recommend to me
some good software to recover the partitions. I know they're still there
because I've run Easeus recovery prog and it sees them.
Do you have any reason to believe the contents of the partition have
been touched? Or just that the partiton entry has been removed from the
table?


If the latter then gpart (short for guess partition, not gparted which
is a sort of PQ partition magic alike) has saved a friend's bacon, it
was a few years back, depends if you're confy with finding a live linux
distro that includes it?
 
P

Peter Foldes

Ed

Sorry to break you bubble. When Win 8 PREVIEW installed and you did not follow the
warnings that was in the Read Me section your partition is gone for good. It is gone
and you are not able to recover it. The Win8 Preview took care of that. Good luck
and next time please be more careful when installing any Preview package or even
some Beta but not all of them. Hopefully you had your important Data backed up.

BTW: I am not trying to be bad towards you but what I told you is the hard facts. As
for myself I always have a separate Hard Drive running as a slave to which I install
these type of programs . This way nothing on my main drive is ever touched


--
Peter
Please Reply to Newsgroup for the benefit of others
Requests for assistance by email can not and will not be acknowledged.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
http://www.microsoft.com/protect
 
P

Paul

Ed said:
I had dual-boot on my computer until recently. Win7 and the Win8
development preview. I booted into Win8 and it reported that it needed
repairs, and then set about doing them. When it finished I could only
boot into Win8, and soon found out that it had deleted the other
partitions on the hd.

I want them back ASAP. I have a backup of the whole hd from a week ago,
but I'd rather try getting the latest partitions back before I resort to
that.

Does anybody have experience of recovering deleted partions?

Ed
So you think it just wiped the MBR ?

You can try TestDisk. You could run it from a Linux LiveCD. Or
from Windows. You could try running it from a Windows 8 "cmd.exe"
command prompt window for example. (Just resize the command window
to meet the minimum x * y dimensions the program needs.) Like
most things in this posting, it'll likely need to "Run as Administrator"
in order to be able to access the disk.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

TestDisk is included on some of the Linux LiveCDs, so you don't
even need to download it.

The problem with TestDisk, is deciding whether the computed MBR, is
better than the situation you were in previously. If you have a backup,
then I suppose you have nothing to lose.

TestDisk can scan the disk from end to end. It can find "deleted" partitions,
as well as real ones. For example, at one time I had four partitions, removed
one and then had three. One day, while fooling around with a Win2K installer
CD, the MBR got wiped. I used TestDisk, and it proposed a four volume
partition table (which is wrong). I kept the information it detected about
three of the partitions, and used that info to set up the partition table
again.

If, at any time, the TestDisk interface results make you uncomfortable,
press <control>-c to stop execution, which works in Linux or Windows.

For comparison and forensic purposes, you can use the Linux "fdisk" to
look at the MBR and its four primary partition entries. You can try this
before running TestDisk.

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

I'm guessing the disk is called "sda". You can use this, to list devices
detected.

sudo ls /dev

Things like hda, hda1 or sda, sda1 etc. are disks. HDA by itself, is the
whole disk. When there is a number after it, that is for an individual
partition. For example, I have four primary partitions on my disk right
now, and in Linux it would be /dev/sda for the whole disk (suitable for the
fdisk command), and sda1, sda2, sda3, sda4 for the individual partitions.

When in fdisk, and pointed at /dev/sda, you press "p" to print the
current table. it's very similar in a way, to what you see in ptedit32,
only presented slightly differently. In terms of units of measure, the
Windows tools use 512 byte sectors, while Linux uses 1024 byte blocks.
Seeing a "+" after a number in Linux, means "and half a block more".

http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/5544/disks.gif

*******

As for Windows 8, I've installed it on two machines.

Machine #1 - Windows 7 laptop
- Install VirtualBox
- Install Windows 8 in a virtual machine
Worked well right away. Graphics even seemed snappy.

Machine #2 - Ubuntu 10.10 desktop (separate drive with only Ubuntu on it)
- Install VirtualBox for Linux
- Install Windows 8 in a virtual machine
Crashed like a bastard, over and over again. Black screen
on most error cases. Eventually, dialing back the emulated
interfaces when setting up the VM, stopped that. Graphics in
this case, seemed to be slower, even though the computer has
4x the compute power, and a better graphics card. It seems the
weak DX 11 graphics in the laptop made a difference for some
reason.

So for hygiene reasons, I insulated Windows 8, and still got it running.
It's not as much fun as running on raw hardware, but a bit safer. There
is no desktop integration for example, so getting files in and out is
tougher.

Paul
 
Y

Yousuf Khan

Do you have any reason to believe the contents of the partition have
been touched? Or just that the partiton entry has been removed from the
table?


If the latter then gpart (short for guess partition, not gparted which
is a sort of PQ partition magic alike) has saved a friend's bacon, it
was a few years back, depends if you're confy with finding a live linux
distro that includes it?
There is a Linux distro called BootMed, specifically designed for
recovering from Windows problems.

BootMed - The Best Medicine for a Computer that Won't Boot, and other
Ailments
http://www.bootmed.com/

Yousuf Khan
 
E

Ed Cryer

Yousuf Khan said:
There is a Linux distro called BootMed, specifically designed for
recovering from Windows problems.

BootMed - The Best Medicine for a Computer that Won't Boot, and other
Ailments
http://www.bootmed.com/

Yousuf Khan
That sounds as if it might help, Yousuf. Thank you. I'll take a look at
it when I have time.
It will boot; into the Win8 dev OS. And I have a good backup a week old;
added to which I've scanned the whole disc with Easeus and found that
everything is still there. In fact I've actually picked off individual
files to prove it works. But what I'd prefer is something to rebuild the
partitions themselves. There's no rush. I have time, and the motivation
to experiment and report to others.

Ed
 
E

Ed Cryer

Paul said:
So you think it just wiped the MBR ?

You can try TestDisk. You could run it from a Linux LiveCD. Or
from Windows. You could try running it from a Windows 8 "cmd.exe"
command prompt window for example. (Just resize the command window
to meet the minimum x * y dimensions the program needs.) Like
most things in this posting, it'll likely need to "Run as
Administrator"
in order to be able to access the disk.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

TestDisk is included on some of the Linux LiveCDs, so you don't
even need to download it.

The problem with TestDisk, is deciding whether the computed MBR, is
better than the situation you were in previously. If you have a
backup,
then I suppose you have nothing to lose.

TestDisk can scan the disk from end to end. It can find "deleted"
partitions,
as well as real ones. For example, at one time I had four partitions,
removed
one and then had three. One day, while fooling around with a Win2K
installer
CD, the MBR got wiped. I used TestDisk, and it proposed a four volume
partition table (which is wrong). I kept the information it detected
about
three of the partitions, and used that info to set up the partition
table
again.

If, at any time, the TestDisk interface results make you
uncomfortable,
press <control>-c to stop execution, which works in Linux or Windows.

For comparison and forensic purposes, you can use the Linux "fdisk" to
look at the MBR and its four primary partition entries. You can try
this
before running TestDisk.

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

I'm guessing the disk is called "sda". You can use this, to list
devices
detected.

sudo ls /dev

Things like hda, hda1 or sda, sda1 etc. are disks. HDA by itself, is
the
whole disk. When there is a number after it, that is for an individual
partition. For example, I have four primary partitions on my disk
right
now, and in Linux it would be /dev/sda for the whole disk (suitable
for the
fdisk command), and sda1, sda2, sda3, sda4 for the individual
partitions.

When in fdisk, and pointed at /dev/sda, you press "p" to print the
current table. it's very similar in a way, to what you see in
ptedit32,
only presented slightly differently. In terms of units of measure, the
Windows tools use 512 byte sectors, while Linux uses 1024 byte blocks.
Seeing a "+" after a number in Linux, means "and half a block more".

http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/5544/disks.gif

*******

As for Windows 8, I've installed it on two machines.

Machine #1 - Windows 7 laptop
- Install VirtualBox
- Install Windows 8 in a virtual machine
Worked well right away. Graphics even seemed snappy.

Machine #2 - Ubuntu 10.10 desktop (separate drive with only Ubuntu on
it)
- Install VirtualBox for Linux
- Install Windows 8 in a virtual machine
Crashed like a bastard, over and over again. Black
screen
on most error cases. Eventually, dialing back the
emulated
interfaces when setting up the VM, stopped that.
Graphics in
this case, seemed to be slower, even though the
computer has
4x the compute power, and a better graphics card. It
seems the
weak DX 11 graphics in the laptop made a difference for
some
reason.

So for hygiene reasons, I insulated Windows 8, and still got it
running.
It's not as much fun as running on raw hardware, but a bit safer.
There
is no desktop integration for example, so getting files in and out is
tougher.

Paul
Thanks for that, Paul. I might look at TestDisk after I've tried the
BootMed suggested by Yousuf Khan above.
I don't mind experimenting. I've got into a situation where what I do
and succeed in winning might end up being of tremendous help to others.
You always give your best here. I'll see if I can prove as useful.

Ed
 
E

Ed Cryer

Monty said:
Hello Ed,

I have had good success with EaseUS Partition Recovery, a free program
available at http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/

HTH,
I've been using that, Monty. It scanned the whole drive and gave a list
of all the files; very, very useful, and free as you say.
However, the free version has a recovery limit of 1GB; and I can't find
a way to restore whole partitions, ie recover the partition tables and
MBR.
Do you think there is a way?

Edf
 
E

Ed Cryer

Well then, Pomposity-on-legs, you'll just have to hope and pray that a
Windows OS under development will limit its destructive mayhem to a
single drive.
BTW, it's not gone for good.
Leave the exploring and frontiersman lifestyle for those who have the
aptitude and attitude for it.

Ed
 
P

Paul

Ed said:
Thanks for that, Paul. I might look at TestDisk after I've tried the
BootMed suggested by Yousuf Khan above.
I don't mind experimenting. I've got into a situation where what I do
and succeed in winning might end up being of tremendous help to others.
You always give your best here. I'll see if I can prove as useful.

Ed
In your other posting, it sounds like you're making progress.
It's just a matter of time, till it's "propped back up again" :)

Paul
 
P

Peter Foldes

Ed

Again:: This version of Win 8 is a Preview version. Do you know what that (Preview)
version is all about?? I doubt it from your replies.I am going to repeat myself
again. If the Win 98 version killed your partition then it is gone. The best you can
or are able to do is to recover some fragmented files. Even that is questionable. I
have been working with Win 8 for the last few months from the start of the Alpha
program. I have been testing and continue testing the Alpha version at present which
you do not even have. You downloaded a Preview where some of the things are exposed
to you. You do not have everything and you have some things that will not be in any
version that will be made public in the future. You can call me whatever you want to
but the fact remains that you lost the partition for good.
Again good luck to and you should have had a backup of that partition which you did
not and now you are crying and making a fool of yourself for your own mistake

--
Peter
Please Reply to Newsgroup for the benefit of others
Requests for assistance by email can not and will not be acknowledged.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
http://www.microsoft.com/protect
 
E

Ed Cryer

Paul said:
In your other posting, it sounds like you're making progress.
It's just a matter of time, till it's "propped back up again" :)

Paul
Testdisk is the one! It was on the bootmed Ubuntu disc that Yousuf
pointed me to (Thank you, man).
It's recovered all the partitions, and they are all as right as rain.
One problem; I get "missing boot manager" when I try to boot into the
Win7 partition.

How do I create a MBR for it, bearing in mind that I'll be working from
either Win8 or some Linux live CD.

Ed
 
K

KCB

Peter Foldes said:
Ed

Again:: This version of Win 8 is a Preview version. Do you know what that
(Preview) version is all about?? I doubt it from your replies.I am going
to repeat myself again. If the Win 98 version killed your partition then
it is gone. The best you can or are able to do is to recover some
fragmented files. Even that is questionable. I have been working with Win
8 for the last few months from the start of the Alpha program. I have been
testing and continue testing the Alpha version at present which you do not
even have. You downloaded a Preview where some of the things are exposed
to you. You do not have everything and you have some things that will not
be in any version that will be made public in the future. You can call me
whatever you want to but the fact remains that you lost the partition for
good.
Again good luck to and you should have had a backup of that partition
which you did not and now you are crying and making a fool of yourself for
your own mistake
Peter, are you saying that the PREVIEW version of Windows 8, which Ed
installed, was not finished and ready for production? Do you mean to say
that there might or might not be things included with it, which otherwise
might or might not be included in the final version, and these inclusions or
exclusions could cause unexpected errors or (gasp!) data loss? And
furthermore, are you also stating that anybody who installs it is doing so
AT THEIR OWN RISK and PERIL, because it's Alpha code?

Maybe you can tell us all again by posting it a FOURTH time! I didn't see
any crying on Ed's part; I saw a request for assistance or experiences with
partition recovery/manipulation software, and I also saw a few souls were
kind enough to offer recommendations. Ed is not the one making a fool of
himself here.
 

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