Quote Originally Posted by Gthang
I opened QTParted, and found out that the bad partition (with the important files on it) was hidden. If I unhid it, and commited the change, would I lose the files, or would it just make it visible to write to it from Windows?
There is no easy answer to this. There is no one official hidden bit in the partition table. Some software does hide a partition by setting the high order bit of the partition type byte, thus making the partition an unknown type, but there are other ways to change the partition table so that the partition is not recognized and thus hidden too. And some OEMs do add an extra "hidden" partition to a disk to hold special recovery software. Without knowing how and why the partition is "hidden", it is my expectation that you will only make things worse and lower your chances of recovering the data if you make changes to the partition table without a good understanding of what has happened and what should be there.