How to find a hidden partition?

[Comtech Solutions]

This one's got me - any imput glady accepted.

Customer brings in his desktop, says he uses it daily (email, business docs etc.) and now it wont boot up. I diagnose dead MB (no post, voltage fine, new video card and power supply tried , no codes on post card).

He asks for me to recover data includinbg his outlook express folders, address book and about 4500 personal pictures. When I plug his HD into my machine with my ide/sata usb cable windows show 22GB used. When I look for where the space is used using treesize free I can only find 12GB, mostly in the windows and program files folders. I do not see any pictures or.dbx files for his email.

Is there some kind of hidden partition I am not able to access? I tried disk management in XP and it shows the entire 80GB HD as 1 partition. DriveImage XML shows the same. I bought a license for Data rescue PC and I am just scanning now to see if it finds anything.

Any ideas for me? Thanks, as always....

 

[camp.cool007]

I know that you can find the hidden partition by typing the drive letter followed by a colon in the address field in Windows Explorer, but that's a mystery to me...

 

[purple_minion]

There is no such thing as a hidden partition, just an os that refuses to acknowledge they exist. If you feel it is a hidden partition you can boot up your friendly linux distro and at the terminal type "fdisk -l" to list all partitions on all local drives. More then likely there was a second partition that got corrupt, in that case testdisk can do wonders to find the lost partition table, also a linux program but available for windows as well. If you boot the systemrescuecd it has both programs on there, as well as photorec, a data recovery program. May not be as good as getdataback but it has worked for me nicely in the past.

 

[Comtech Solutions]

Well to wrap this one up:

I used Data Rescue PC and found all of the missing data. It showed it as being in the usual place, but it sure didn't show in Windows! I have a few other machines on the bench right now - if I have time I'm going to use this as a learning opportunity and try and figure this one out.

I haven't stepped into Linux yet, been putting it off. Saved for another day, I guess...

 

[ashgray2]

I don't think there is a hidden partition.... Maybe try to use Partition Magic to be able to check if there an hidden partition. Try this word around.

 

[iptech]

I know that you can find the hidden partition by typing the drive letter followed by a colon in the address field in Windows Explorer, but that's a mystery to me...

Not always true, some system builders such as Dell & HP use non-standard file systems to keep their recovery partitions hidden from explorer.

The best way is to use a good partition tool such as PQ Magic, but be careful as you can screw-up the OEM MBR if you're not careful.

 

[wideawake]

Late in the game here, but, did you ask customer if they were using PGP or TrueCrypt or other encryption software?

 

[Cetamega]

If it was encrypted he wouldn't have been able to recover it like he did.

 

[wideawake]

I never said if it was encrypted, just asked if they had used said software.