System Recovery Wiped Out My Partition

[stamp2k1]

   I am working on a friends computer that got a pretty nasty virus affecting his system files. He had his C:/ drive and his D:/ drive which is his "recovery" drive. I created a new partition and moved all of his  music, pictures, business info, etc...... to the new drive. It was about 100gb worth of files.

   I did a system recovery to reinstall windows back to it's original state and as it was formatting it clearly said that all files on the "partition" (The C:/ Drive) would be deleted and put back to their original settings. I didn't care because all the files I needed were moved to the new drive.

  After the computer restarted, it only showed the C and D drives and the 100gb of files and folders were lost. Why would I lose the partition along with everything else?

   Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thank You in Advanced.

It's an HP Pavilion p6310f

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do.

A system recovery from the recovery partiton or recovery disks normally will delete all partitions on the drive and re-create just the partitions that came with the PC.

It doesn't know that you have created any other partitions, so it isn't programmed to warn you that all data on your hard drive will be lost, but that is really what happens.

Always back up data onto a portable hard drive before performing a system recovery and unplug the portable drive before actually proceeding with the actual recovery process.

Paul

[stamp2k1]

If that is in fact the case then HP should get their **bleep** together and word it differently. I thought I was being careful in creating another partition.

Saying that I will lose all data on my HD is one thing BUT that is COMPLETELY different than saying I will lose everything on my partition. 

I would like to Thank You Paul for answering my question as aggrivating as it was.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

I'm sorry that I had to be the one to give you the bad news, but someone had to.

We've all learned something the hard way at one time or another, when it comes to PC's and life in general.

[CherylG]

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Paul_Tikkanen wrote:

We've all learned something the hard way at one time or another, when it comes to PC's and life in general.

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Yep. I will never forget the time I had added a second internal hdd and used it for files,photos,etc. Booting from a Recovery Disk wiped it out. Seems HP Recovery isn't the brightest, it used the entire first hdd for the recovery partition and installed Windows on the 2nd hdd. I now know to unplug any extra hdd whether internal or external during a Recovery.

[stamp2k1]

For what it's worth, I was able to recover everything I lost using a program called EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Pro. All the Music, Pictures & Video files were recovered.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Glad to read you were able to get those files back!

[Matt_Lo]

Sorry to hear about the confusion but glad to hear you got your data back. I personally agree the Recovery Manager isn't the perfect option (thankfully Windows 8 will have built in recovery options so we may not have to deal with RM in the future).

For future reference, I was go by the 3-2-1 backup plan. Bascially it means you have 3 copies of your data at all times. 2 of those copies will be on hard drives (one on your actual computer, your working data, the other copy on an external drive), and 1 copy should be offsite, such as with online back or so-called cloud services such as dropbox, skydrive, carbonite, etc. This way, you have a backup, and a 2nd backup incase something happens that destroys both your orignal data and your "onsite" backup.

[Lulu1958]

I have just been reading this topic with interest as i also did a system recovery I have managed to reinstall my internet and printer and also managed to find all my music file,s it took  lots of patience and persistent determination though.

But unfortunately i cannot get my outlook express up and running.I lost all my email folders and documents and even office 2003..My windows XP has served me well for over 6 years and is starting to show signs of age but the one thing i have learnt is to not be so quick to do a system recovery...