Hey I need help restoring a lost partition on a 320Byte HD. I did a clean install of xp on the 127GB partition with sp2 but due to bad planning and no backup i can't get to the data on the other 170Gb partition. Xp sees it in administrative tools but its unallocated with all of my lovely data. Please advise as to what steps and what S/ware will stop me from been Killed. While im here could i also ask what would you use to make a HD as clean as the day you bought it and what would you use to clean Index.bat files every now and again?
I was just about to post a question on formatting so here is the answer I found. To Format, I'm about sell my HD on ebay so I am going to use this http://www.download.com/Active-Kill-Disk-Hard-Drive-Eraser/3000-2092_4-10188745.html?tag=lst-0-1 To recover I have used tools in the past to get off a corrupted HD. Check out download.com for them, unfortunately you will have to buy one if you need a large amount of data. Unless someone has made a good freeware one since
Of note it says it is a Dos command and you have to boot up with a floppy, but i ran the other exe and have cleared a 250GB USB external drive in 3hrs51mins zippy