sman123

thanks for the advise. i will give it shot. it will be a few days before i will be able to try it. but i will post back here and let you know how things turn out. again, thanks for your help.

DennisD, you are exactly correct. the 200GB allocated space is where the 2 other partitions were (vista partition and the data partition). as i thought the data is probably still there- although tricky to get to. as stated in my original post- not that big of a deal if i cannot recover the files. i am willing to spend some time trying to recover them though. 2 questions here: 1) if i create a new partition consisting of the full 200GB without formatting - will Recuva see it and attempt to recover the files? or will this only make matters worse? 2) is there a free Rescue Package out there that i can try to recover the files with? i guess that's 3 questions... thanks again for your help here.

Thanks for the quick reply! hope this answers your questions. I was not clear i guess. recovery cd wiped MFT even though it only ran for a second or 2. reinstalled xp pro on newly created partition 1. no other partitions are created at this time. looking in My Computer shows only C:\ drive only. In Disk Manager shows 2 enteries. first is C: 32GB NTFS second is 200GB unallocated thanks

Hey all! 1st thanks for some great programs! been using ccleaner for over a year and it works great! I have a hp dv9700 laptop that I had set up with 3 partitions. 1= xp pro, 2= vista ultimate and 3= data. I would like to say that if I don't get the files back it is NOT the end of the world. I may lose a little bit of data but i will live. lol It would be nice if i had it though. What happened: I wanted to reinstall xp and vista. i was having problems with my vista install (after i installed xp of course). I read somewhere that some hp recovery disk give you options... but noooo not mine! lol it started the format process right off. so shutdown and reinstall xp. now I have xp on 1st partition and have not created any other partitions. when i run Recuva it only scans the C: drive. Deep Scan, same thing. Do I need to create a partition? Am I out of luck? Thanks!