First 32GB of partition accidentally overwritten, recoverable?

[mi5ke]

Hi,

I have an external USB disk which had one big 500GB partition on it.

By accident, an unrelated installation program wrote a new 32GB partition over the initial portion of the original partition.

So now I have a 32GB partition, and the rest shows as "Unallocated" in Windows Disk Management.

I can use QPhotoRec to recover the files from the unallocated partition, but, of course, the folder structure is lost.

Is there a simple way to recover the structure? I thought about removing the small partition, making it all unallocated, then see if TestDisk can restore it - but that seems risky (and not sure how)?

Thanks for your help!

Mike

[cgrenier]

Run TestDisk, Analyse, Quick Search, Stop, Deeper Search, Stop.
If TestDisk lists an NTFS partition using the whole disk, set this partition as P(rimary).
On next screen, choose to write this partition.
When asked for BackupBS, select it and confirm.
Quit
After a restart of your computer, run "cmd" and "chkdsk /f d:" (replace d: by the correct drive letter).
If chkdsk failed, run PhotoRec (or QPhotoRec), be careful to store the recovered files on another disk than the source disk.

[mi5ke]

Thanks - currently it is running a QPhotoRec, which is working, but has been running for nearly a week now. It is still finding files, but seem to be repeatedly reading the same sectors, over and over, stuck between 78% and 82% done, again and again.

Should I just leave it to finish?

Thanks again!

[mi5ke]

Oh - just as I was typing the last message, it finally stopped! Hooorrrrraaayy!

Thanks,

Mike