Hi Dennis,
What happens after 3 hours of the promised 24 hours the program has finished and didnot found a partition.
So I had to start all over again and I tried another suggestion Partion Wizard Home Edition 5.2. That program did also not find a partition but recommend to download PDR6free (power data recovery) also from MiniTool.
That program could recover I hope all of the data from the corrupted/deleted partition (photo's, documents, even .dbx files from Outlook Express and several cabs.
All together more then 12 GB. But all as raw data e.i. all photo's (.jpg) were numbered form 1 to 3600 and also all documents. So no names but numbers
So far so good. I will have a look at your last suggestions now. I tried Testdisk but it is a command line program.
Was it a system partitions. Yes and no. It is a Packard Bell laptop with normally 2 partitions. The C: partitions is used by PB to recover XP form scratch in case of problems.
De d: partition is the boot partition having XP installed and all of the user data on it.
As the laptop didn't start up properly, somebody installed XP from a CD to the C: partition, after trying to recover it from C:. Those actions did delete or corrupt the d: partition.
What I will do now is install XP on C: and use the d: as a data partition.