OK, I messed up with a Linux install (in dual-boot) and when I went back to Windows I found out that the last partition of my hard disk was marked as RAW and not NTFS anymore. Windows is of course prompting me to format it, which is what I want to avoid at all cost, because I think all the data it there, and guess what, I got no backup from what was stored on this partition. So the question is: is there a way I can make Windows mark it back as NTFS…I already did a fixboot and fixMBR, doesn’t change anything. I guess the first sector of this partition only is corrupt and I need to repair it. Help appreciated …will attempt a few things but I don’t have much hope.
edit: could it be that the partition is just unmounted ?
Hmmm… You’ve messed it deep…
Maybe, just maybe, a partition manager (I remember Acronis has this feature of changing the partition type).
Partition Wizard also (right click the partition > Modify > Change partition type ID).
DO IT AT YOUR OWN RISK.
thanks for the feed back, I installed Acronis (just in demo mode so there’s not much I can do with it) but that was enough to see and tell that the Linux bootloader was installed at the beginning of that NTFS partition instead of /root …partition type is “GRUB” ::). I found a free partition manager (partition wizard/MT solutions), and I can see the partition ID is OK, 0x07, so that’s NTFS. The ID is not the issue but the first sector of the partition, and I haven’t got a clue how to repair that…may be with diskpart…
I got an image, but just from the system drive…and anyway, guess what guys: I GOT ALL THE FREAKING DATA BACK … I can hardly believe it myself ;D what I didn’t mention in my previous posts here is that the RAW drive was a bitlocker encrypted drive, because I thought if I say that everyone will tell me to forget about the data… no way to repair a bootsector on such a drive etc… which is probably true (when seen as RAW), but…I googled a bit, found that Bitlocker recovery tool for Win7 was already in Win7, and that the downloaded tool I had was just for Vista. So I run the appropriate command in a console, pointed to an empty partition, and everything got decrypted to it 8)
…will attempt a few things but I don’t have much hope.