I've done a truly stupid thing and 'deleted' the data disk on a Server 2008 R2 box. Can I recover it? If so, how?
I was rebuilding the box because a motherboard change had broken things. I've built loads of boxes and was going through the standard stuff without much concentration. I got to the disk screen which normally displays the two paritions on the drive: the recovery one and the system one. As normal, I deleted the two things I saw. It was only when two lots of unallocated space didn't merge into one that the full horror of what I'd done hit me. Yes, I've got backups... of the stuff I have space to back up. The real irony is that, earlier in the day, I'd ordered to 1 TB disks to deal with the problem.
So, anyway, I'd really like to get this partition back because it'll save me a lot of time. How can I do it?
Put the drive in another machine (take an image/clone of the drive if possible) and run data recovery software like R-Studio, GetDataBack NTFS.
If you are not sure how to do this, contact a data recovery company near to you. But always check the company is good first by searching for info about them on web.