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How f*cked am I?!?!


colemancb

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Well, I'm pretty much bouncing off the walls right now. I was installing Windows 2000 and accidently told it to format the wrong drive. In the installation, I went by the drive letters, and basically it told mixed up my C and D drives, so it read my boot drive (the one I wanted to wipe) as the D drive, and the drive with all my data as the C drive.

I am running some random tool I found called Zero Assumption Recovery, dunno how good it will do. I had over 11,000 songs on there, stuff for work that is irrecoverable, stuff for school that is irrecoverable, etc...

Please don't give me a lecture on backing things up. I can't just drop $150-$200 on an external drive, and it was certainly not feasible to burn data to DVDs. If this is all you're going to say to me, please, don't. It wasn't a hardware failure...simply an accident.

What are my options as far as unformatting goes? Are there any?

EDIT -- The drive is now being reported as 74GB instead of 120GB..... :-(

Edited by colemancb
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....

I am running some random tool I found called Zero Assumption Recovery, dunno how good it will do.

....

What are my options as far as unformatting goes? Are there any?

The idea is to ask for help BEFORE using an app. ;)

However, if you just quick formatted the drive, you can try with TESTDISK:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

or you can try with its "counterpart" photorec:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

to recover the files.

You will need another drive with enough space for the recovered files.

If you have a few bucks to spare and the drive was NTFS, these two COMMERCIAL apps are very good:

http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/iUndelete.htm

http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm

The "poor man's" option is this one:

http://memberwebs.com/stef/software/scrounge/

jaclaz

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If you reformat and then do not write anything to do the drive after you get into Windows, and use a data recovery tool like Recuva (freeware) or R-Studio or Runtime GetDataBack, and scan over a network connection, I'd say you have a good chance of getting your data back.

However, most people immediately install all their programs again and are then beyond the point of a typical software-based recovery.

This is why we make backups.

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If you reformat and then do not write anything to do the drive after you get into Windows, and use a data recovery tool like Recuva (freeware) or R-Studio or Runtime GetDataBack, and scan over a network connection, I'd say you have a good chance of getting your data back.

However, most people immediately install all their programs again and are then beyond the point of a typical software-based recovery.

This is why we make backups.

that will only work if you do a quick format :}

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Lol this happened to me about 2 months ago. What I did was buy this software called active partition recovery (it is actually a bunch of different app including DOS floppy versions and windows PE) and installed windows on another hard drive. I ran the software which scanned the drive found and restored the data. Since then I have used the software for all sorts of data recovery related tasks. I recommend this software as it has save my a** too many times to count.

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a program that worked for me is called Get Data Back NTFS, there's a Get Data Back FAT as well.

but as advised before, do it over a network if possible, if not, make it a slave and do it in another computer, but make sure you have the hard drive space you need for recovering.

not to beat a dead horse, but might i suggest and external enclosure for a hard drive, and moving the data drive into that? external enclosures are cheap, and they don't require you to buy a hard drive.

i've done similar things in the past, so i know the feeling of losing several thousand songs.

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that will only work if you do a quick format :}

False. I was able to recover data with R-Studio fully intact on areas of the drive that had not been written to as much as others after 6 reformats (full format).

actually you are right. i just reasearched it and neither the quick of the full format erases any data. i was told by multiple people that the full format writes over the entire disk, but that apparently is not true. i need to tell at them now :realmad:

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