*help* deleted OS X partition

[FredAkbar]

Hey guys, so this is actually a friend's issue (really! ) that I'm trying to fix for him...I'm not sure about the exact details, but basically at some point during the boot camp partition/install he messed up and deleted the partition of his HD that has OS X on it. I don't believe anything was actually erased because it only took a couple seconds. So the data is potentially still there, just the partition map is missing/screwed up. So right now his 93 GB hard drive has a 15 GB partition with Windows XP (which works fine) and...nothing else. Where the other 78 GB should be, there is no volume listed.

I've tried booting up with the Leopard install DVD and opening Disk Utility, but it only shows the Windows partition, and all the verify/repair disk options are greyed out. I've looked around on the Internet but haven't had any luck yet. I'm wondering if someone knows how to recover the lost partition, which should be possible since the data hasn't (we assume) actually been written over.

Thanks in advance in anyone can help.

 

[italiano40]

the partition is very much gone, i am sorry to tell you and your friend time to restart and install leopard

 

[Trip.Tucker]

Amazing isn't it? Mere seconds and yet, you bet! You toasted it. Once you blow the directory/table entries ... Game over.

 

[FredAkbar]

With pessimism like that, I'm surprised you guys get anything done

I've recovered my friend's data. For anyone interested, here's what I did:

I downloaded a program called TestDisk. Ran it in Windows. Didn't entirely know what I was doing, kind of winged it really. It found the missing partition and rewrote it (the partition map) correctly to the disk. Then I booted up from the Leopard DVD, went into Disk Utility, where the Mac partition now showed up as Macintosh HD. I clicked Repair Disk. After that, it still wouldn't boot normally from that partition (even though Startup Disk recognized the 10.5.2 install), but it's letting me boot in single-user mode (hold Cmd-S at startup). I plugged in a spare external hard drive and got it to mount. I'm currently backing up the recovered partition onto the external drive, at which point we can safely do whatever we want, e.g. reformat my friend's hard drive and install Leopard again.

 

[Littleodie914]

Wow, congrats on getting that fixed, it's more of a miracle than you might believe. And kudos for not giving into the pessimism, I know I would have!