Data loss is something that almost every computer user is familiar with or has experienced firsthand. Yet in spite of the rise of better backup and disaster recovery solutions, it still happens, either by accident or due to hardware or software failures or even malicious activity. A common way to lose data is to accidentally delete a hard drive partition, which also removes all content on that drive. It is easy to do this by accident when installing a new operating system or configuring a dual boot setup. Most computers come with multiple partitions on their hard drives. Often, these are configured in the factory. For example, there is usually a partition for recovery, which contains all the original factory default software from your computer. It might be safe to delete this, if you have another backup, but working with partition manager tools always carries the risk of deleting something important.

Fortunately, when you delete a partition, none of the data is deleted, at least not initially. Instead, the file system is deleted, along with the master file table. This is a hidden database on the partition which includes the entire directory and file structure of the drive, thus allowing modern operating systems to access its contents. Without it, the entire partition will simply be marked as available space. This also means the original data can eventually be overwritten, which is why it is important to act fact. If you do not, the data may be permanently lost. For example, if you are reinstalling your operating system from scratch, and you delete or format the original partition before realizing there was something important still left on it, you should stop the process right away. As soon as you start creating or modifying new partitions or installing the operating system or making any other changes to the disk, the chances of getting your data back intact drop significantly.

Active@ Partition Recovery has been designed to exploit this opportunity to help you get back what you've lost. It's a freeware toolkit that helps you recover deleted or damaged partitions and logical drives, including system hard drives themselves. You can perform recovery operations within Windows too. However, if you are unable to boot up your computer because you accidentally deleted or lost the system partition where your operating system was installed, there is still hope. You can recover these partitions and any other across your storage devices using a recovery boot disk with the Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE). Alternatively, if you are a Linux user, you can use the Linux-based LiveCD recovery environment. The Active@ Partition Recovery application itself has a simple quick-scanning feature that detects and recovers recently deleted partitions, provided they have not been formatted or overwritten after deletion. If that fails, there is also a deep-scanning method and a last-chance recovery method for individual files.

The latest version now adds applying Boot Sector Template to any disk sector. The last chance recovery kernel has also been improved. Finally, the Ultimate version now includes a new version of Active@ Boot Disk based on the Windows 10 build 2004.

Try it out today at https://www.partition-recovery.com/index.html.