Broken Lenora

I broke my computer today. I know, I should have been working, but I got to installing FreeBSD 5.4 on a spare harddrive. My intention was to set up a dual boot system for playing around. Unfortunately somewhere down the line I hosed my partition information for my Windows XP drive. Yeap I had lost everything.

After I came down from freaking out over what I did, I had to figure out how to fix it. Given what I was doing, I determined that the data on my hard drive was not lost, but rather was missing. If I could repair the partition information I could access it again. I booted up the laptop and tried to find programs that would recover the partition information. I tried TestDisk from my Freesbie disc. It was able to detect that I had and NTFS partition, but was unable to recognize that it spanned two harddrives.

There were some other programs that I could try, but I would need to reinstall Windows to get them to work. In order to not lose any data on my main hard drives, I installed Windows over the FreeBSD installation that got me into the problem in the first place. When that was done, I tried PC Inspector File Recovery, but it didn’t work. I then went back to TestDisk, which I was now able to run from Windows. It worked like a charm. My partition information was reconstructed and after a reboot, Lenora was working again.