My computer has 3 hard drives. C Drive(Windows), D Drive(Storage only) and G Drive(empty). My D Drive has all of my photo, music and backup files only. When I went to install my Mepis 6.5 into the G drive, which I was going to use for Linux, I screwed up royally and installed it in the D Drive. Going back to Windows to make sure all was good, it wasn't. My worst fears were realized. My storage Drive(D) was partitioned with one active partition and two unknown systems partition. The Active partition is probably my stored data, but I no longer can access this data. My D drive is not recognized by Windows. Under Disk Management I can see the partitions. It no longer has the D letter designation. How can I regain this drive so I can re-access my data again? The amount of Active data corresponds to how much I had total in my stored data. I sure could use some help here.

pljvaldez: Thanks for the link. Too late. I foolishly wipe the hard drive trying to install Mepis. I was advised on this forum and another that hardrive hda was the first bootable drive. Well my choices to install Mepis were hda, hde & hdf. Since I have 3 hard drives in my computer, I selected hdf, which in reality was my D drive which was my storage drive. Wiped out all my photo albums, MP3 music collection and many data files. What kills me is losing the photos of my grandkids from the day they were born up to today. I blame no one but myself for not throughly checking this out or burning a CD of the albums. Anyway, thanks for your response.

You can still recover even if you wiped the drive. The only data you may have lost is if Mepis wrote over the particular blocks on the hard drive. If it didn't write to that space, it's all still there (unless you used secure wiping like Norton Clean Sweep or shred on linux).

Formatting the drive using a partitioner only erases the data structure, not the actual data. So you can still run photorec on the drive and get back any data that hasn't been written over by Mepis. The key is to stop using the drive so you don't write to it any more and risk losing even more data.