No big deal, but recently his son has expanded one of them and made a small mistake: he made it a FAT not NTFS. Result: he cant get to his data.
Yo Jolie, just one thing, your friend's laptop has two partitions, one is FAT and other is NTFS, and his son expanded the FAT partition, is this?
If yes, you can try some things.
1- maybe the program what his son used to expanded the partition have an option to back to the previous status (what is hard to happens). And if happens, maybe the data can't be recovered.
2- he can get the data what he have access yet and record it into CD-Rs and format the H.D.
3- he can send the laptop to the store, and ask for help, but i don't think somebody can help him on this problem.
4- The hard disk, when you delete something, these files stay there for a time, in "other section" of the disk, you just lost the files if you record something on the disk in the same area, you have some programs to recover deleted data, but i don't think this can help now, cause of the situation. Before you resize a partition you have to defrag the disk, cause if don't do it, with sure you'll loose your data. When you resize a partition, the table(fat) subscribe the other table(NTFS).
5- You can try to resize again the fat partition to the original size, but i don't think this can help too, if you'll do this use the same program.
6- Maybe have other way what i don't know.
7- He makes his son find a solution or......... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/evilgrin1.gif" alt="" />
