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Recovering Partition after Deeper Search

Posted: 11 Nov 2014, 00:03
by jaimetaylor
Hi guys, I humbly request your assistance on something.
After 50 hours of Deeper Search I was able to find the partition I meant to recover, but I could only change its status from Deleted to Primary, which I did. Then in the partition table only appeared one primary partition which I suppose was the one I meant to recover, so I hit Write and confirmed till the end. After rebooting, my PC is now displaying only a blinking underscore. Is it doing all right? How long could it take (The partition held 200 GB)?
If this is normal, another problem may come up: in the partition I'm trying to recover there's no OS. So I was wondering if it's going to overwrite the current OS with whom I launched TestDisk. If it is, will I be able to access my files as to backup them on an external strage?

Your help would be greatly appreciated, I'm panicking since 2 days ago.

Re: Recovering Partition after Deeper Search

Posted: 11 Nov 2014, 09:26
by cgrenier
If I understand correctly, your computer has a single hard disk and a partition was missing from this disk.
You have used TestDisk to recover this partition. It seems you forgot to set the actual partition holding your OS as *(bootable) before choosing to write the new partition table.
You can put your HD on another computer or boot your computer from a LiveCD
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Livecd and run TestDisk again to select all the partitions this time.
You can also choose to copy all the files from the partition you have recovered and reinstall your OS.

Re: Recovering Partition after Deeper Search

Posted: 11 Nov 2014, 09:54
by jaimetaylor
Thank you very much for your answer, sir. Indeed, It's exactly as you said, so it helped a lot. Now my computer is still displaying a single blinking underscore after rebooting since 14 hours; is it writing the partition table or is it due to having no bootable partition? A final question, if I may: I don't need to recover the partition with the OS I forgot to add, I only need to recover the files on the partition I recovered, so can I simply install a new OS trough disk on this partition after it's recovered as to access them?
Thank you again for your answer.

Re: Recovering Partition after Deeper Search

Posted: 11 Nov 2014, 19:04
by jaimetaylor
Problem solved, I was able to transfer the files I recovered to an external hard drive then to make a clean install of Windows. Thank you very much for your support. :D