Friend trashed her OS9 hd partition on iMac g3

[California]

A friend of mine on an ancient iMac G3 400mhz accidently deleted her OS9 partition on her hard drive by dragging it to the trash.

The OS 9 partition still shows up as a partitioned hard drive in the system profiler. She had a 40 gig drive in there that she had partitioned for OS 9 and OS 10.3.9.

The OS 9 still shows up greyed out in disk utility.

It does not show up in Start Up Disk.

Can I maybe try to archive and re install through an OS 9 disc somehow and save her photos that she had on that partition? Or do you guys think it is lost forever and erased?

Thanks for any advice.

 

[nusynergy]

Os 9 is pre my knowlage of Mac.

Was it her primary OS?

 

[vandlism]

The data, more than likely, is gone. You'll need to find an older piece of software that would support finding files (particularly OS9 files) from a wiped drive. If she is running OS X as a second OS, then maybe you can find an older version of Data Rescue or something similar that would run and support the version of Mac OS she is currently using. So while the data is currently gone, the partition remains. It's just empty.

 

[ADent]

How exactly?

If you drag a partition to the trash, it should just unmount. Reboot and look what is up in disk utility.

If she deleted all the files on it, it should still mount.

If you click on it and select mount in Disk Utility what happens?