Converting back to NTFS without formatting?

Currently my hard drives have no file system structure. This is due to a bad linux install.

Using an external program, I can see that my data is still on the hard drives, but it's inaccessible so formatting is NOT an option.

I would normally just use the "convert" command but to do that, you need a drive letter but my hard drivesdon't have one.


1. How can I convert my hard drives to an NTFS structure, without formating? Partition magic doesn't work for this.

2. If I delete the partition, will that also delete the data found on the hard drive?


Thanks!

Deleting the partition will effectively delete the data, so if you wish to retain that data, then deleting the partition is not an option.

Your best bet may be to use a linux bootable CD, mount and copy off all the data.

What do you mean by a bad Linux install?

How where they partitioned and mounted before you had the problem and what problem did you have?

With more detail we maybe able to suggest a recovery utility you can try

Unfortunately, the drives have NO file system structure so linux isn't able to access them either. It recognizes the hard drives, but I still can't access the drives.




It was a bad install because Ubuntu wouldn't let me finish the installation. It gave me some error and it couldn't complete.

I had Windows XP and 7 as well as Fedora all installed and working, but once I tried to install Ubuntu, all of my problems began.

They were partitioned as NTFS when I first purchashed them.

The external program I used to look at the data was EASEUS Data Recovery. I'm not interested in doing a recovery as that would be much more work then a conversion to NTFS....

However, that's what I'm going to have to do if I can't convert the drives...

You could try Spinrite.

You cannot convert something you can't read normally.

First step is to try and recover the data. To do this you will probably need and extra drive to try and do the salvage on as any writes to the corrupted drive may overwrite important information and make it more difficult if not impossible to recover anything.

You need to try and find out what went wrong, ie what has been corrupted. Programs like Drive Genius, Stellar Pheonix, R-Studio are some of the commercial versions that let you see if it can be recovered with their free version (you need a full version to do the recovery).

If none of these shows you positive signs (or any other utils others might know of) then you need to ask is it just the OS installs that you have potentially lost or personal files and data. You may then want to concentrate on getting just those back and unfortunately have to do a reinstall of each of the OS's again.

Recovering corrupted file systems and faulty drives from other but a simple fault can easily take more work than reinstalling.

You'll probably want to read up on how exactly filesystem data is stored on the drive. After you've tried to recover what you can, there might be a way to edit a hidden file on the drive to make it appear as it has a NTFS formatting again, however if ubuntu changed more than just how it's represented, you may be at a loss. I find it odd that ubuntu touched your other partitions at all, it should have only accessed the 2 in which you were installing to.