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I have a friend who was trying to use Norton Ghost to move his Windows XP installation to a new hard drive. He created an image of the drive on an external USB drive. Somehow, he ended up have Ghost delete the partition on the USB drive, but he thinks all the data is still there. Is there a way to restore the partition to the drive? Thank you for any advice.

There's a utility called TestDisk which I've used before to fix this:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Well, not a Ghost FUBAR like this, but a deleted partition.

Can't he just re-ghost it? That should be more reliable than any after-the-fact repair.

Thank you for the link bthylafh. JBI, its not so much the image he wants to get back, but other data that was also on the USB drive.

Ahh, I misunderstood.

That's not good; it sounds like he may have told Ghost to do a drive-to-drive (or partition-to-partition) image, instead of creating an image file in the existing file system on the USB drive. If this is the case, then his original data is probably not recoverable by mere mortals.

TestDisk is a reasonable thing to try, but I would not be optimistic.

I'll be honest. I have no idea what he did. I know he did a drive backup to the USB drive to create the image. He then booted off the Ghost CD to start the "recovery" to the new drive he installed. After that it gets a little fuzzy. I know he created partitions on the new drive himself (how I don't know), and then tried to restore the image to one of the partitions he created on the internal HDD.

Ahh, maybe he accidentally partitioned the external drive instead of the internal one. In which case the data should in fact still be there.

Yeah, I won't know until he comes into the lab with the drive. I just hope I can do something for him.

I just wanted to thank bthylafh again for the TestDisk suggestion. I was able to copy off all of the data on the drive to my computer. I also tried having it restore the deleted partition. It seems to have worked, but I am also getting some file system errors on the drive. At least I was able to get the data before I tried that. Thanks again!

Glad it worked!