I have a 20GB Hdd, and had 5 partitions on it. The bootable one was NTFS. I tried to install Windows 98 on it and it posted an error message (it didn't recognised any partition on the hdd) and I chosed to let it fix this. That's how it cleared the MBR (I guess) and tryed to make 1 partition on the whole HDD. I have used fdisk /MBR after this but with no effect. So I run fdisk and cleared the partition and made a small one (1,5 G instead of 2G) for the system.
If anyone can help me with this PLEASE help me because i had 15 Gb of files that I wouldn't want to lose.

PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you very much!

Bogdan

Well you might get at things with Drive Rescue (click this link) , But me thinks you may have to pull the drive and temporarily slave it into another machine that has room enough to copy you data, using Drive Rescue. Then Start fresh to Fdisk and Format the drive, and copy your data back from the 'helper' machine.

How to Use the Fdisk Tool and the Format Tool to Partition or Repartition a Hard Disk (Q255867)

Beware -- the more you mess with and write to this drive, the lower your chances of recovering all your data.

Bogdan,

I hate to tell you this...But...Fdisk repartitions your drive, and all the data is lost.

You're out of luck. Sorry..

Next time, make sure and back up your data before you attempt to install any Operating System.

You stated that WIN98 attempted to make one partition, but you didn't say if it was successful. Then you said that you ran FDISK and cleared the partition and made a small one. Were the extended and logical partitions ever deleted? If not, you should see the previous extended/logical partitions. If they were in fact deleted, follow the advice from tinkerbong and attempt to recover the data to a second drive(it will have to be your new primary). And like tinkerbong said, the more you mess with and write to this drive, the lower your chances of recovering all your data.

Jennifer, you can re-partition and format a drive and still be able to recover files. It works fine unless you overwrite the data by loading a new OS.

He said that he installed Win 98 on it and repartitioned to make the bootable partition 1.5 GB. So, he has installed an OS over top of what was a larger partition.

I am not sure who meant what here, but my understanding of file destruction is that repartitioning does not actually destroy the data but you cannot get it back with DOS. However, if you overwrite your data it is gone in everybody's book.

Active@ Partition
Recovery is a compact but powerful DOS utility which recovers deleted
partitions or Logical Drives completely and also can backup and restore Master
Boot Record (MBR), Partition Table, Boot Sectors.

There are two products I've seen called Fast File Recovery and Fast File Undelete. Search for these programs. I'm not sure how much they cost, but they claim to fix this type of problem. good luck.

i want recover harddisk partition please
tell me any methed about partition recover
i am waiting your email
thank you
bye

If you want to retrieve the files, you can use a utility called 'Lost & Found', which is made by PowerQuest. This utility is not perfect, it will not put back the remeoved partitions and cannot recover data from NTFS partitions, but if the data hasn't been writen over, if the data was not badly fragmented and if the partion was originally FAT12, FAT16 or FAT32, you can recover the files.
Now for the bad news: You will need to buy (or borrow) another hard drive to put the recovered data on, and it takes a long time (several hours at least).

Lost and found is well under £40 (UK).