NTFS partition recovery is possible, and it's your ticket to accessing all your files again, without having to reinstall your entire system.

I don't think you are reading about NTFS partition recovery for fun. It's not exactly light reading, is it? In fact, there is a good chance your partition was just lost or was accidentally deleted, and you need to use a NTFS partition recovery utility to recover your data. Let's get started...

Guessing Is Not A Solution

If you deleted, lost, corrupted, damaged, or accidentally reformatted apartiiton, leave it alone. The files within it are probably still intact (alive and well). But, since the partition is not being recognized, the operating system cannot read the files and the data within them.

We can use a NTFS partition recovery program to revive the partitions, so that you can access you files again. And if that does not work, we can 'chunk' the NTFS partition recovery software, and go after the files with other data recovery utilities.

First, it is very important that you do not write or save any more data to the drive until the NTFS partition recovery process is finished. Don't even turn on your computer. Why? The partition you want to recover can be denoted as unused-space within the file system. This means, if the operating system interacts with the file system components, it might write new data where your partition lies. If this happens, well, I would send my condolences, because your data would be dead.

One Word of Caution

Before using a NTFS partition recovery utility, there is one function I highly recommend that you avoid. At the end, when you are given the opportunity to restart your system, opt out. Instead, go through the entire recovery process by transferring all files to a different storage device, just like you have to do with data recovery software. The reason why is, at this phase in the recovery process you do not know the state of the file system components. If there is corruption, when restarting your computer, while using a NTFS partition recovery program, you run the risk of losing the data intended to be recovered. Better safe than sorry.

What If It Doesn't Work? 

If the NTFS partition recovery program does not do its job, it's time to move to the next stage, which is to recover the files within the unrecognized partition using a data recovery tool. The data recovery process is similar to hard disk partition recovery , in that both tools can reclaim your lost data; they just go about it differently.

The Good News

There are several good data recovery and NTFS partition recovery utilities on the market, and they are reasonably priced, especially the undelete ones. Just divide the cost into the number of hours you took to create everything, and you will feel much better about going through with the process. Investing in a data back-up package would also be a good idea. Otherwise, one day in the future you will probably be repeating this process again. And if you are like the rest of us who have blown a partition or two away, and have had to endure NTFS partition recovery, you will never have to be reminded about this point again.