Windowss 7 "recovery" - strange data loss

[no-mbr]

I was "testing" Windows 7 Ultimate to see how the backup and recovery features worked. I had a disk with two partitions - one holding Windows Server 2008, and the second partition of Windows 7 Ultimate.

Both OS had unique boot loaders - and could each boot independently. I backed up the Windows 7 partition - which appeared as volume "C" while it was active. (Server 08 was showing as Volume "E" in this configuration.)

I deleted the Windows partition and booted to a "recovery CD" which was made by Windows 7. It located the backup files on a 2nd hard disk and started the recovery process. (it warned that all data on drive to be restored would be lost) When it was finished, the Windows 7 OS was restored and was designated as "C" drive. The Server 2008 partition was still there and marked as "E."

Today, I go and look at the Windows Server partition and discover that the "data" is gone - except for the system volume info and recycle bin.

It appears that the Windows 7 recovery process must have formatted or somehow deleted all the files on the partition for no reason. The system volume information coincides with the volume being created during the recovery process.

Is there anyway to recover a previous NTFS volume of a partition and the files it contained, assuming the volume has not been otherwise written to?

[Paul Komski]

Is there anyway to recover a previous NTFS volume of a partition and the files it contained, assuming the volume has not been otherwise written to?

Well the volume obviously has been written-to otherwise you wouldn't be able to boot to Win7. I can't see any way of restoring the whole partition but you have a reasonable chance of recovering some or all of your data files using a utility like GetDataBack for NTFS (http://www.runtime.org). If you still have the backup are you sure you cannot find your files on the backup itself??

I do not have extensive experience of using the native backup of either Vista or 7 but have never been happy when backing-up a partition from the partition you are running at the time and which is why I remain an advocate of ImageForDOS or BiNG for such partition backup.