I accidentally deleted a partition on my external hard drive. It is a 500GB WD My Book Essential 2.0. It has 100GB of unallocated space at the beginning of the drive. Is there any free software that can quickly detect my deleted partition despite the 100GB of unallocated space in the beginning? Please help!

Do you mean recovering the data from the deleted partition?

As mentioned in another post:

Originally Posted by jephree

There are software options depending on the corruption.

This one has a free version:

http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file...htm?language=1

Most others cost @ $70+ USD: (you can scan for free but recovery costs):

http://www.google.com/search?source=...overy+software

No, this is a new problem, the old problem was resolved, but I was running some diagnostics and accidentally deleted the partition. I simply deleted the partition. I have tried using Active@ Partition Recovery, but it scans the unallocated space in the beginning, 100GB, slowly.

Was not insinuating it was the same problem just reposting such software as I know of.

I would try the first link which is free.

If it does not work try some other scans.

If they find your data then you need to decide if the data is worth the money to buy the software.

As far as I know Active@ Partition Recovery works the same way in that it scans for free but will only restore after purchase.

The first step is finding a product that will detect the data.

Such scans might take several hours to complete.

Oh, now I see... I will simply stay with Active@ because I have a license to use that already. I will leave my computer on while I go to work for the program to run then. I will see if the partition gets successfully recovered.

I figured out what I did with the diagnostics. I accidentally clicked write zeroes and it ran for about 2 minutes. Will that affect my partition the partition though? There was 100GBs of unallocated space before that partition. I assume the diagnostics only wrote 0s to part of the unallocated partition.

Success! I was able to recover my entire partition fully. Thankfully the unallocated space was there so the writing zeros didn't damage my data. Active@ reported that the partition was in excellent condition. Thanks for your help.