Uninstalling PLoP - Lost all partitions

Started by lbaty, March 16, 2010, 01:55:19 AM

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lbaty

I have a Fujitsu Esprimo Laptop (Intel Core-2, 2GB Ram, 120GB HDD) running Windows 7.

* Decided to try PLoP
* Followed instructions to install via Win7 boot menu
* Install worked OK but couldn't get PLoP to boot my Win7 installation (booting from UBUNTU live DVD showed my data still on the HDD)
* Created PLoP boot CD and selected "completely uninstall PLoP" expecting my PC to boot back to Win7
* Now I cannot boot
* Additional investigation revealed I now have no partitions on my HDD  :(

My friend owns a PC store so I borrowed his copy of Active@ Partition Recovery (it's still running but I don't like my chances).

Does anyone have any suggestion about how I can recover my data?
What could I have done wrong to cause this problem?

Elmar

hi,
how did you create the cd? the install cd iso's you get from my site do not allow the complete uninstall. only the option 5 (short uinstall) is allowed from cd.
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#instop

restoring your system is not difficult. its good to know how your system looked like. i mean what partitions you had. its possible to restore one partition after the other. but you need some knowledge.

regards
elmar

lbaty

Thanks Elmar,

Looks like I made a few mistakes ...
* I used the floppy disk image on the boot CD
* Used complete uninstall which presumably expected to find a backup on the floppy (which didn't exist as the CD is effectively read-only).

No luck with Active@ Partition Recovery, but thankfully Winternals Disk Commander came to the rescue recovering my main partition (unfortunately unable to restore my encrypted partition).

I have since recreated my partition structure using various tools and restored my MBR using the Win7 boot DVD.

Have learnt a lesson and will be more careful in the future!