How restore encrypted partion after deletion

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Hi All:
I need to restore an encrypted (TrueCrypt) partition that I accidentally deleted because XP was showing it as “unformatted”. It was a 197.59 GB partition – one of two on a 1 TB drive. I used Acronis Disk Director 10 to delete the “unformatted” partition then extended the size of the remaining partition to end up with just one, 1 TB partition.
The thing is I need to “unmask” /recover the whole 197.59 GB partition intact so that TrueCrypt can mount it. Recovering just files will not work as they are encrypted and only by mounting the 197.59 GB partition as a unit will TrueCrypt decrypt the contents.
Acronis DD would not reverse the process of expanding the larger partition into the space left after deletion of the 197.59. So I am stumped. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Regards
casey

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Unless you have a backup of the files you are out of luck. Once the partition information is deleted there is no going back.

cheers, Paul

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Thanks Paul – but I’d wished that you would have given a Windows Secrets subscriber enough credit that he would not write asking for help from the editors and members-at-large if he had a back up of the lost data.
Regards
casey

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Skyrider,

Programs like Restorer Ultimate (http://www.restorer-ultimate.com/) and GetDataBack (http://www.runtime.org/index.html) both have the capability to recover partitions after they have been erased. Never any guarantees, of course, but they are worth a shot. They both offer a free download and test run to see if they can see your partition.

Good luck!
Randy

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Thanks Randy! Will give them a shot. First I will do a sector-by-sector clone of the whole drive and work with that just in case things go wrong a little during restoration attempts
Thanks again.
casey

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Casey, you said you had overwritten the partition. In that case you are out of luck. I mentioned backup because it really is your only option.

cheers, Paul

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Casey, you said you had overwritten the partition. In that case you are out of luck. I mentioned backup because it really is your only option.

cheers, Paul

Thanks for the reply Paul. I don’t quite know what you mean by “overwritten”… I did not actually say I wrote any data to the drive. What I did was to “delete” the partition under Acronis, and as next step, I added the now “unallocated” space to the neighbouring partition by resizing. I have not used the drive since – except for reading it with Windows Explorer. Does this make the situation any less bleak?
Cheers
casey

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Hi skyryder,

Unfortunately, as Paul said, when your partition was deleted, and the space merged into the other one, it is gone. If the new unallocated space had not been merged into another partition, there are some tools that can/might recover non-system partitions, such as Active@Partition Recovery. However the fact it was an encrypted partition also throws a wrinkle in the matter and I am of the opinion it would not work.

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Try Kernel for FAT and NTFS data recovery software for the recovery of your encrypted partition of your hard drive.

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Thanks indeed AirBender! Sounds promising!

casey

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