Hi, One of my friend has a Dell Inspiron laptop. He had the following partitions C,D,E,F with some valuable data in other partitions except C. Recently he faced a problem with media direct buttons in the laptop and its relative driver dlls, which corrupted the OS stability. He reinstalled the OS by formatting the C Drive alone. After the OS loaded he could see only 2 partition listed in the explorer. C: - Unpartitioned Space(96GB) D: - Dell Media Direct. What could be the problem and how can he recover the deleted partitions and data from it?

If he had used the Reinstallation CD that came with the laptop he would have restored the system to its original configuration. So he's able to boot the OS? If he's only seeing those two partitions with C as unpartitioned and D as the OS Partition (I'm guessing), then it's obvious he didn't use the Reinstallation CD and formatted C, then installed the OS on D. Although, information on the Dell Media Direct informs us "Understanding the Dell MediaDirect Partition Some Dell notebook computers include a special Dell MediaDirect feature. MediaDirect enables you to watch DVD movies, slideshows, or listen to music without having to boot the complete XP operating system. MediaDirect is installed in a special partition on the hard disk, but is hidden so you cannot see it when XP is booted normally. When the computer is off, pressing the MediaDirect button will boot the MediaDirect partition instead of XP. ". So, is that how he's booting the machine? And it really doesn't boot to the OS? Hopefully, he used best practices and has backups of his data. "So won’t you give this man his wings What a shame To have to beg you to see We’re not all the same What a shame" - Shinedown

I think you might have missed something here. Xp installs itself to C by default. You are showing that C is unallocated, which means it is not used for anything. I think you need to redo this trhead to the proper issues or you are not telling the whole story accurately! It is the disadvantaged who habitually elect Democrats on the belief of personal change--- yet they remain disadvantaged.

I agree that something is not right. jennifer has more knowledge about this issue but I will say that it appears WinXP may not be installed at all. I would suggest that before anything else is written to the disk your friend attempt recovery. If it were my computer the first thing I would do would be to boot to a live version of Linux, like Knoppix. This will allow them to view, and possibly copy, whatever exists on the disk. Knoppix is free to download but is large. 700MB. Just fits on one CDR. There is also a DVD version but the CD version is all that is needed. Google for it.

Obviously some info is missing, however, speaking from experience Some OEM copies of XP, the earlier ones, did not support NTFS (makes no sense but is true). Is it possible that the C partition is actually NTFS but that the setup system is not able to see it? Since the actual OP is not the person doing this work I suspect that said OP may not know the EXACT status of the situation, and that OP's friend may actually not have an active OS at all.

I go along with Othehill's suggestion to start a file recovery process. You could use a Linux CD, or another option would be to remove the hard drive and attach it to another system with a USB adapter. Below are a couple of pretty good file recovery programs that can be used: PC Inspector (freeware) http://www.snapfiles.com/get/pcinsp... Zero assumption Recovery http://www.z-a-recovery.com The demo is limited It will only recover 'up to' four folders per run But you can make multiple runs

"Some OEM copies of XP, the earlier ones, did not support NTFS (makes no sense but is true)." This is news to me. Can you provide documentation of that? Always willing to learn.. "So won’t you give this man his wings What a shame To have to beg you to see We’re not all the same What a shame" - Shinedown