Precautions to protect old deleted disk partitions

One of the keys or tricks if you will to accomplishing successful deleted partition recovery is to be careful not to overwrite certain areas of the partition with new information. An example of this process would be if one were reinstalling their operating system on its original hard drive and partition. Our purpose is to at some point rescue files that have been deleted through the reformatting of the hard disk drive as a result of reloading the Windows operating system.

If we were to upgrade our version of Windows from XP to Vista the size allotment for footprint that the newer operating system would require would exceed that of the older and consequently overwrite many of our archived files. If we simply load the original operating system back onto the drive partition we are then able to use partition recovery software. This software will recognize the original contents of our reformatted partition and allow us to recover and copy all of the data it contains to secondary external storage.