Recovering data from unpartitioned space?

[petery83]

I had Windows XP SP2 newly installed on a 300GB Maxtor HDD divided up into a 30,720MB partition (C and another partition consisting of the remaining space. As I finished installing Doom 3, the computer locked up, and I was forced to press the reset button. On rebooting, a "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter" message came up. I then inserted a disk, got into the Recovery Console, and got back out after realizing that I didn't know what to do. I then restarted again, but this time going to reinstall XP on the 30GB partition. At that point I found out that the entire hard drive was listed as unpartitioned space. Is there any way to recover the data on the hard drive?

I have another computer with Win2K SP4 available to put the hard drive in, if necessary.

Cliff notes: Possible to recover data from a hard drive where the partition table(?) is messed up/non-existant?

 

[bersl2]

Recreate the partition table. The data is still there. Use basically any partitioning program that will not format for you (if the recovery console can't do this, Knoppix can). Depending on the units involved, you may need to know the drive geometry to get exactly 30,720MB. But that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

 

[petery83]

I was Googling and wondered if this was what you had in mind:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/docu.../XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkd_tro_ldau.asp

I'm thinking about using the Recovery Console to replace the Master Boot Record, as I'm unable to get into XP even in safe mode (F8 on startup does nothing).

In the meantime, I'm getting a copy of Knoppix as a backup plan...

Thanks for the help!